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

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