How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet Paperback – December 2, 2008

Great coffee table gag book. I have a small collection of these types of books and is a nice conversation piece when noticed.

As the title suggests, I was looking for an overall plan view of what colonizing mars might look like. Zubrin does a good job of outlining the general chemistry and overview but under the guise of a travel guide. "You want to drink water on Mars? Here's how you're going to do it". For the most part this felt like it hits the mark but I found a myself skipping ahead a bit when it was going off the deep end describing what marriage, mafia gangs, and politics might look like. Maybe leave that to the sci-fi writers. To be fair, you don't buy a book like this for a story, you want to understand how the next 10-100 years of humanity will survive on Mars. This does a good job.

This book is half way to being a pretty good novel. In this book, Dr Zubrin provides a very well thought milieu, including a convincingly rendered Martian planetary environment , a group of settlements, based loosely on a cross between the old West and the Original colonies, and a repressive, Nanny-state regime on Earth, extrapolated from the present in the best Heinlein `If this goes on `tradition.The book can be divided into two parts, basic survival , and thriving. Under `basic survival `How to get to MarsHow to choose a spacesuitHow to choose your first ground roverHow to choose your homestead.Choosing the right technologies for your hab.How to save money on radiation protection.How to survive in the desertHow to make anything.How to grow food that is actually edible.This is basic Robinson Crusoe stuff.Further up the Maslow Pyramid we have how to Thrive on Mars. This includesHow to get a Job that pays well doesn't kill you.How to fly on Mars.How to invest your savings.How to make discoveries that will make you famous.How to be a social success on MarsHow to avoid bureaucratic prosecution.All of these involve avoiding the well worn paths set out by the Terrestrial Nanny state, the sisterhood or the two working in tandem.Zubrin sets these out in entertaining fashion,.Other than the Martian Authority, which is a branch of the terrestrial Nanny state, and the Sisterhoods, which seems to be an interplanetary teamsters union, there are no characters. Without characters, there is no plot, but this book would be a good start for a budding Heinlein, or a aspiring Martian settler.

I have enjoyed reading this book, from the perspective of someone who is never, ever going to Mars. I'm retired, so the possibility is not there for me, and I even wonder if a much younger self who had the opportunity would go.In any case, it's a fun read. There's lots of interesting technology in the book, which I can forget at will, and there are a lot of hilarious zingers directed against the bureaucracy, Martian or Terran. There are also very funny parts about the NASA-supported idiots who went to live on the moon -- the "Loonies." (Would that be the Newt Gingrich crowd?)This would probably make excellent bed-time reading. Put it next to your bed and read a little bit before drifting off to sleep....

Bob Zubrin really knows his stuff when it comes to the Red Planet. And here he gives us a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, projected look at the guidebook he would write for the wanna-be Mars immigrant of the late 21st century. That's cool. And it's fun and informative.But that's the end of the good news. Here's the bad news.1. This work is extremely short. It is barely more than novella-length. It is about half of the length of a "normal" best-selling novel. That's word count, not pages - the print edition must have pretty big type. And fully 5% of the "book" is a bullet list of the topics! The market value of a locked digital copy of a novella-length work is about $2, not $10. So this is a rip off in the basic sense of content-per-dollar.2. The Kindle Edition is a trashed OCR scan that borders on unreadable and will drive you nuts. Starting halfway through the first chapter, a few random words or phrases in each sentence are in italics. I can't get my REVIEW to emulate THAT, so instead I'LL SHOW you by inserting some WORDS IN capitals TO emulate the problem. Don't YOU think this IS really irritating? IF it doesn'nt BOTHER YOU yet, then you haven't SEEN enough of IT and you'll just have TO take my WORD FOR it, it IS really annoying.So how do I know it's OCR? Smoking gun: part of a caption reads "A/lost people look better in...". Classic and obvious OCR glitch: a flyspeck in the M caused it to mis-read "Most people.."; once it saw the first hump in the M as an A, it was lost in morphospace trying to assign some char values to the rest of the M! There are hundreds of other cases, in many of them it is quite difficult to work out what the actual text is supposed to be.I have no idea why they did this stupid book trick. Clearly Zubrin did NOT type this on a Selectric and mail them a hardcopy typescript! Clearly they HAD a perfectly good digital copy to start with! So it took real incompetence to decide to put the print edition through OCR to get this. But then to not PROOFREAD IT AT ALL? If anyone had EVER read the edition released here, it could not have been released. Because it is absolute trash.So it was not proofread - just OCR'd and heaved out the wire. Well, there are millions of Americans recently unemployed. And IMO everyone involved in producing this garbage Kindle Edition should be added to that roll call, at once.ATTENTION ANGRY MARS FAITHFUL!Zubrin wrote a good little book. And I'm a big Zubrin fan. In fact, some years back I met him in a social context that allowed me to have a treasured one-on-one conversation with him. But here I'm REVIEWING A COMMERCIAL PRODUCT AT A GIVEN PRICE. My review asserts my considered opinion that THIS PRODUCT AT THIS PRICE IS AN ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE VALUE. Not that "we shouldn't go to Mars", or "Zubrin is terrible", or any other thing you want to impute other than what I just asserted. If you read the KINDLE VERSION OF THE BOOK and don't agree, by all means comment and/or post your own review, and explain your position. But spare us all from a hate campaign of "not helpful" votes from people who already made up their minds [if you already made up your mind about a book before you read a review and thus were not looking for 'help' then a not helpful vote is a LIE that pollutes the Amazon community!] and just want to "punish" speech they don't agree with, and from a stream of insulting comments that misrepresent what my review says.