The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Through a freak set of circumstances, an astronaut is abandoned on Mars when the rest of his NASA crew departs. Now he has to survive.

Ahaha, okay.

Things this book doesn't care about: Doing the omniscient POV well; doing epistolary well; giving characters anything more complex than the most obvious, primary-colored emotions; the actual psychological experience of being left alone on Mars to die.

Things this book cares about: How to extract hydrogen and create your own water molecules from scratch OMG.

This was a lot of fun, and compulsively readable in places. But let's get real here: I can see exactly why this book was self-published for lack of an agent, and simultaneously why Crown later acquired it (though I am baffled as to why, during the editing process, they didn't sit Weir down and have a long, firm talk with him about how jaw-droppingly terrible the last few paragraphs of the book are. Seriously, they're seventh-grade essay about the nature of mankind bad. It's like telling someone their fly is unzipped – it's embarrassing, but someone has to do it). Anyway, this is a cool space survival piece with loving (and fascinating!) descriptions of growing potatoes on Mars and orbital mechanics calculations sprinkled with occasional quips, and really disinterested or just incompetent everything else.

Basically, I really dug this. But I actually bet myself halfway through that this was going to be made into a movie, and yep, I was right. Starring Matt Damon and directed by Ridley Scott, which, uh-huh. And I just . . . look. Being able to spot a book that a major studio is going to snap up for adaptation? That isn't actually a compliment. That usually means the book is a good adrenaline vehicle with only cut-outs of human beings in it, where the emotional arc – such as it is – can go comfortably down in one small swallow and be immediately forgotten. And . . . yeah.




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