ISET is proud to share the success story of its second-year student, Akaki Mosakhlishvili who recently translated the famous Sci-Fi novel “The Martian”. The publishing house “Books in Batumi” decided to publish a series of books, which includes classical, reputable, and brand new Fantasy and Science Fiction books. These series include such well-known writers as Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Strugatsky brothers, Clive Staples Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, and others. Drawing on previous successful cooperation experience, Akaki and his friend David Baliashvili decided to choose another book for the series. The first one was the collection of stories by Ray Bradbury. In search of a new book, they came across Andy Weir's “The Martian”. After reading a couple of pages, Akaki and David were sure, this was what they were searching for. By the way, this was Andy Wier’s first novel and was a smashing hit around the world. The publishing house helped deal with the official part of the job and the two friends did their best to bring the book to the Georgian readers at its fullest.

Akaki is very enthusiastic about the genre and the novel itself. He believes this is the genre that will make everyone fall in love with Sci-Fi. The novel is full of Sci-Fi elements, like traveling in open space with rockets, stations on the planet Mars and NASA activities. Readers will find themselves reading about lots of unknown to physical, chemical, and mathematical terms. The story is told in a simple way by a brave man and unmatched humorist, astronaut Mark Watney.

As Akaki mentioned to us, he is honored that it was exactly him and his colleague, David who first read this book in the original language from the Georgian audience. As he says, it would be unfair if they kept this nice story for only themselves and did not share it with the rest of the Georgian society. That is why they did everything possible to tell the story in the best way possible.

Akaki holds a BA degree in Business Administration from Tbilisi State University and is now a second-year student at ISET. His interests include, obviously economics, all kinds of games, literature, music, and experiments.

A special note of caution from translators: Do not read the book, if you have just removed your tonsils, as the novel is fantastically funny.

ISET is happy to have students like Akaki and would like to congratulate on the translation of yet another book.