andy weir - What's going on with the ending of The Martian?

My library copy of The Martian by Andy Weir finishes with Mark's rescue by the rest of the Ares 3 crew. The last line is:

This is the happiest day of my life.

However, the LibraryThing page for the book claims that its last line is:

It was a nice, boring afternoon.

Googling this sentence gives me, among other things, a questionably-legal version of the book with an additional scene at the end that's not in my physical copy, in which Mark is on Earth.

Is that scene genuinely part of the book? If so, why is it not in the version I have?

Answer

It looks like the final paragraph was intentionally left out of the latest versions of the ebook and audio-books. Andy Weir discusses this in a recent interview on Allreadable;

"They're re-recording it from scratch because there were a lot of edits and changes between the original Kindle version and what's releasing now. No significant plot changes, nothing like that, but a lot of the wording. It's much more polished. And it's much better now thanks to Julian at Random House."

I'm guessing that the editing choice was because earlier versions were self-published whereas the later versions are published by Random House. The paragraph in question contains a scene where the protagonist swears at a young child, something which a book publisher might shy away from, especially given that they're intending to licence the book to a Hollywood film.

Comments

harry potter - Do the Kwikspell courses work?

In Harry Potter we are introduced to Kwikspell course in The Chamber of Secrets (and never hear about it again). We see Filch taking courses, presumably by mail. The descriptions of Kwikspell make me think it is for people who are weak in magic (kind of like how Neville was supposed to be when he was younger), but had magic in them nonetheless. However, Ron's comments later in the chapter make it sound like it is mainly for Squibs to learn magic. However, it is strongly implied through out all the books that Squibs are essentially Muggles, and will never be able to do magic. How then is a Kwikspell course supposed to work? Do we have any information to know if it works at all? Is it a scam? An answer from any level of canon is welcome. Answer Kwikspell courses are (probably) useful to some wizards, but not to squibs. The Kwikspell course literature comes with two testimonials. Madam Z. Nettles of Topsham writes: ‘I had no memory for incantations and my potions were a family joke...

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In time Keeps on Slippin' , Farnsworth creates a basketball team which he matures by abusing Chronitons. This leads to time skipping forward by random, but ever increasing amounts. How much time was skipped in this way? Answer Unfortunately, I don't think a good estimate can be made for this, for two reasons: Many of the time skips move forward by an indeterminate amount of time. At one point, the Professor mentions localized regions of space skipping forward much more than others. We then see two young boys on the street below complaining about having to pay social security, only to suddenly become senior citizens and start complaining about wanting their money. Thus, each individual could have experienced a different amount of time skippage.

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When I saw the original Star Wars saga as a kid, the concept of the Dark Side imprinted in me was quite simple. You did a bad thing, so you're a bad person so you go to the Dark Side and keep doing bad things. Now, obviously this doesn't hold true in reality. In my mind it is perfectly reasonable for Luke to kill the Emperor and Vader and then just flee the Death Star and rejoin the Alliance. After all they are at war, those are enemy officers that have captured him and are taunting him by threatening with death of all loved ones and the whole operation was intended to kill the Emperor anyway. The same would hold true for Anakin. He could have killed Mace Windu to save the Chancellor and Padme but that doesn't mean he's going to then go mad and kill all Jedis including children. It doesn't add up from a merely psychological point of view. He had a set of objectives and that made him want to keep the Chancellor alive (quite valid by the way, Mace Windu is quite clums...

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