The martian young readers edition5/22/2023 ![]() ![]() Huge dust storms roam the planet, carving out canyons and valleys from the rust-stained surface. It’s also 100 times thinner than Earth’s, allowing dangerous amounts of UV rays, as well as meteors, to reach the surface. The atmosphere is 96 percent carbon dioxide. ![]() Mars, on average, lies roughly 140,000,000 miles from Earth. Marina Vladova is chair of the English Department and Creative Thinking Initiative coordinator at Andrews Osborne Academy. She has worked as a magazine editor and writer in New York and London before returning to Ohio to be closer to family and mentor young writers. As Terence, the ancient Roman playwright, said, fortune favors the bold. ![]() As a pragmatic and tenacious risk-taker, Watney demonstrates qualities that we want to instill in our teens, who in all probability will also find themselves in unfamiliar habitats. While The Martian is stylistically deficient, it can nonetheless be a valuable read for teenagers. This kind of writing demands closer and slower reading and engages us in higher-order thinking. We linger on his words: “The rocket stood in the cold winter morning, making summer with every breath of its mighty exhausts” (from Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles). Even though Ray Bradbury’s work has the formal properties of science fiction, he attends to language. Although one might argue that The Martian is a genre novel and therefore does not need to do any of those things, what attracts us to good science fiction is least of all the science. ![]()
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