“It’s been a really good way to understand ionic compounds<br />and bonds and all the things you can do with chemistry,” Jarret Haven, 16, said of studying “The Martian.” “It’s really opened up my mind.”<br />For Mr. Weir and his publisher, getting the book into schools opens up a lucrative new market<br />that could turn “The Martian,” which was already a blockbuster that sold several million copies, into a perennial best seller that guarantees a built-in audience every year.<br />He also calculated how many calories Watney would need to stay alive, how much water he would need to grow potatoes,<br />and how he could manufacture water out of oxygen and hydrazine, a compound used for rocket fuel.<br />Next month, Mr. Weir will address science teachers at the National Science Teachers Association’s conference in Los Angeles,<br />and his publisher will give away around 500 copies of the classroom edition of the “The Martian<br />“I got a lot of emails from science teachers who said, ‘Man I’d love to use your book as a teaching aid, but there’s so much profanity in it<br />that we can’t really do that,’” said Mr. Weir, 44, who is cheerful, hyper-analytical and casually profane, much like his protagonist.<br />In a science class at Northwestern High School in Mellette, S. D., sophomores are using the novel as<br />a jumping-off point for some hands-on experiments, like splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.<br />The novel was pretty easy to amend, by simply replacing the foul language with tamer words like “screwed,” “jerk”<br />and “crap” (Mr. Weir said there were “occasional squabbles” when he tried to lobby the censors to keep some of the less offensive swear words in.)
