The Martian

It's true, you know. In space, no one can hear you scream like a little girl.

Okay, I'll start with the cliché: The Martian is Apollo 13 meets Castaway, and since the main character is a smart-aleck, I pretty much imagined him as a younger Tom Hanks (but now that I know he'll be played by Matt Damon in the upcoming film adaptation, that was an easy mental switch to make; more Interstellar, less Joe Versus the Volcano). A comparison to movies rather than books is, I think, the fair approach since, while this is a fun adventure tale, it's not exactly literature. And that's not a complaint: The Martian is a good yarn with plenty of chuckles, and while the story arc and characterizations were formulaic, the details made for an entertaining read.

After a catastrophic event and a presumption of his death, astronaut Mark Watney was left behind on Mars when his crewmates were forced to evacuate the planet. Being a Botanist and a Mechanical Engineer (the mission's MacGyver), Watney immediately began to assess his situation and plan for long term survival. During this early part of the book, the story is in the form of Watney's first-person, wise-cracking mission log. Eventually, NASA discovered that Watney was alive, and in conventional third-person narrative, they began to plan a rescue mission. The two formats alternate as Watney and NASA go about their business:

Teddy swiveled his chair and looked out the window to the sky beyond. Night was edging in. “What must it be like?” he pondered. “He’s stuck out there. He thinks he’s totally alone and that we all gave up on him. What kind of effect does that have on a man’s psychology?” He turned back to Venkat. “I wonder what he’s thinking right now.” 

LOG ENTRY: SOL 61 
How come Aquaman can control whales? They’re mammals! Makes no sense.

So basically, we go back and forth between the life-or-death tension of the misadventures of a maverick-space-genius on Mars and the bureaucratic posturing of the stuffed-shirt eggheads in Houston. And while the Mars-based action is fun -- and while I understand that what's happening back on Earth is an important part of this story -- the NASA-based parts have lame characters with the worst dialogue:

"I'm Mindy Park. I work in SatCon."

"You a director or something?"

"No, I just work in SatCon. I'm a nobody."

Vencat looked to Mitch. "I put her in charge of tracking Watney. She gets us the imagery."

"Huh," said Mitch. "Not the director of SatCon."

"Bob's got more to deal with than just Mars. Mindy's handling all the Martian satellites, and keeps them pointed at Mark."

"Why Mindy?" Mitch asked.

"She noticed he was alive in the first place."

"She gets a promotion 'cause she was in the hot seat when the imagery came through?"

"No", Venkat frowned, "she gets a promotion 'cause she figured out he was alive. Stop being a jerk, Mitch. You're making her feel bad."

Mitch raised his eyebrows. "Didn't think of that. Sorry, Mindy."

Mindy looked at the table and managed to say, "'kay".

Aarrgh. Anyway, that's what happening on Earth. Briefly there's a comm-link established between the two sides, making for exchanges like this:

[08:31] JPL: Good, keep us posted on any mechanical or electronic problems. By the way, the name of the probe we’re sending is Iris. Named after the Greek goddess who traveled the heavens with the speed of wind. She’s also the goddess of rainbows.

[08:47] WATNEY: Gay probe coming to save me. Got it.

Fine. Moving on. Like an astute reviewer said, "Very quickly I realised that on a large scale I didn’t really wonder what was going to happen; rather, HOW it was going to happen.", and that's what makes The Martian a good read: whether or not Watney ends up getting rescued, this story is about the pitfalls he faces and the jury-rigging he needs to figure out, and more often than not, his first solution doesn't work, and meanwhile back on Earth, time is running out and NASA is scrambling to face their own challenges. To bring up Apollo 13 again: even though that film was based on historical events and the viewer knows that the crew makes it home alive, the stakes and the mishaps along the way make for an exciting story. As a bonus, having seen that movie gives the reader of The Martian handy mental shorthand for the astronaut and NASA experiences, and in a way, makes it forgivable that author Andy Weir doesn't add much depth to his characters.

Weir's Cinderella story is worth noting too: He was a child prodigy and was hired at 15 as a computer programmer. Long fascinated with space flight, physics, and astronomy, Weir began writing sci-fi in his 20s. After having his work rejected by publishers, he serialised The Martian on his website for free, only making an ebook available for purchase after fans requested it. When it became a best seller, Weir was offered a publishing deal, and the hard copy of the book was also a success. Weir devoted many years to research to get the science right in The Martian, and Watney spends a lot of time talking chemistry and engineering:

The regulator uses freeze-separation to sort out the gasses. When it decides there's too much oxygen, it starts collecting air in a tank and cooling it to 90 kelvin. That makes the oxygen turn to liquid, but leaves the nitrogen (condensation point: 77K) still gaseous. Then it stores the O2. But I can't get it to do that for hydrogen, because hydrogen needs to be below 21K to turn to liquid. And the regulator just can't get temperatures that low. Dead end.

These sciencey bits add believability to Watney's experience, and even though they sometimes went over my head (or at any rate, I sometimes skimmed so as to not lose momentum), real-life astronaut Chris Hadfield's cover blurb praising the book's "fascinating technical accuracy" confirms that they're an important part of what works in this book. 

In the end, The Martian is cheesy good fun and will probably make a better movie than it did a book. I'd rate it somewhere between 3 and 4 stars, happily rounding up because I'm not comparing it to serious literature; whatever that is.

Speaking of Matt Damon as Mark Watney: