Fourth Planet from the Sun

Odysseus. Robinson Crusoe. Lemuel Gulliver. John Carter. All intrepid voyagers. All castaways. All stranded a long way from familiar shores. Add to that illustrious list Mark Watney, hero of the 2014 novel, The Martian.

Of the castaways listed, Watney, an astronaut marooned on Mars, shares the most with Robinson Crusoe. The other three spend their lost years dallying with other cultures and races; Crusoe and Watney have to endure total solitude with only their wits to keep them alive. Well, their wits plus boatloads of equipment they can salvage as they await either rescue or death. One thing that makes stories about castaways so fascinating, is that very question of whether they'll live to return home. Author Andy Weir's saga adds a new dimension to the ancient fascination: his rigorous use of cutting-edge science. Yes, the book is science fiction, but not in the same vein as Edgar Rice Burroughs' story of the Earthling-turned-Martian, John Carter, which relies much more on fantasy than it does on science. And Weir's science is solid as bedrock. No swooning Martian princesses here; no four-armed giant swordsmen; no eight-legged pets. Just an airless, desiccated planet where even a simple mistake might mean dying.

Andy's site describes him as a software engineer and lifelong space nerd. With the publication of The Martian, Weir's first book, he also adds the job description of best-selling author to his resume. His crisp writing snags the reader's attention from the first sentence: "I'm pretty much fucked." How can you not want to read the next sentence?

According to The Wall Street Journal, Weir first put his book on his Website in 2011 free of charge. Later, he began selling it on Amazon for 99 cents. In three months, it sold 35,000 copies, and agents, publishers, and movie studios perked up their ears. Crown Publishers bought the book for six figures. Twentieth Century Fox optioned the film rights.

One of the best things about the novel is that it celebrates not just the adventure story of one man's ingenuity and resourcefulness in the face of overwhelming odds, but, as Watney says, "the sheer number of people who pulled together just to save my sorry ass." The epiphany of the last page comes from Watney's realization that "every human being has a basic instinct to help every other out. ... Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh?"

Yes. Way cool.

Rising Land of the Sun

A few days ago, I came across a TEDtalk by an author I had never heard of, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (It constantly amazes me how many authors and books are out there -- a small indication of just how huge the world really is.) After listening to Ms. Adichie's discourse, I checked out her book, Half of a Yellow Sun, from our local library. With only the vaguest idea as to what the book was about, I began reading. (This goes back to my long-held belief that the best way to experience a book is without preconceived notions, with no inkling about the book itself, other than author and genre. Otherwise, the reader risks losing the rich glow of original response. I know this seems at tautological odds with the idea of book reviews, but I look at what I offer here as the beginning of a dialogue rather than a diatribe.)

Picture credit: Akintunde Akinleye

One of the dim memories I retain from my childhood during the last half of the 1960s is the phrase used by middle-class American mothers to prompt kids to finish their meals: "Think of all those starving children in Biafra" -- as if how many peas and carrots we left on our plates would make any difference in some country on the other side of the world which we couldn't even point to on a map. What I didn't realize at the time was that literally thousands of children and their parents were being starved, stabbed, shot down, blown up, or beaten to death in the Nigerian civil war which raged between the years 1967 and 1970.


While I was holed up in my bedroom, wolfing down anything science fiction, it turns out that I missed not only socialization with my peers, but significant news events, too. One of those events was the conflict in Nigeria, one of the largest West African countries. A cousin of mine and her husband were serving as Christian missionaries in Nigeria from 1963 to 1973, but that brought the place no closer to my everyday world. I was too absorbed in myself, too oblivious. I paid scant attention to history even as it was happening on the world stage.


So the further I read into Adichie's book last week, the more my sense of bewilderment grew. When I finally realized what the story was about, that realization stunned me. It was only then that I pieced together the name Biafra and those half-forgotten memories, and applied the results to the book I had in front of me.

According to Wikipedia, Nigeria is inhabited by over 500 distinct, sometimes warring ethnic groups, including the Hausa and Igbo peoples. The action of Adichie's novel ignites from a mass murder of Igbo by Hausa, leading up to the declaration on 30 May 1967 of the independence of a chunk of the southeast of Nigeria to be known as Biafra, and to serve primarily as a refuge for Igbo. The story centers on an Igbo woman, Olanna, and her family. They start off as well-to-do, middle-class, highly educated people; the narrative follows them as the war forces them out of one home after another, constantly leaving behind more and more possessions, sinking lower and lower on the economic scale, mirroring the effects of Nigeria's embargo on Biafra itself.

Adichie excoriates the white colonial mentality which drove exploration/exploitation from the 15th through 20th centuries. Early in the book, one of the characters rails about being "a Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria." At the Berlin Conference of 1884, the European powers divided up what they termed 'the Dark Continent.' In drawing what they thought should be national boundaries, Britain, Russian, and other colonial powers completely ignored the reality of tribes which had existed for thousands of years with their own histories, their own mandates of allies and enemies, with the results turning out not unlike trying to stuff a dozen cats into a broom closet.

By telling her tale through the eyes of characters intimately involved in the secession attempt itself, Adichie reveals in a more compelling way than any history book could, the multitudes of reasons the white man's plan would only produce resentment and exacerbate tribal conflicts. It was exactly the same story Europeans had tried/were trying with the indigenous peoples on the American continents. One of the most telling quotes comes from an old tribal man who says to a European,  the "people of Igboland do not know what a king is. ... It is because the white man gave us warrant chiefs that foolish men are calling themselves kings today."