by Andy Weir
Sometimes you find a book that reads like a great action movie - fast-paced, plot-driven and suspenseful; these are the kinds of books that keep you up really, really late at night because you just need to finish this chapter, and then the next one, and then the next one, until eventually you finish the entire book in one sitting.
The Martian is one of these books(so is The Girl with All the Gifts, but we can talk about that one another time). The Martian is the story of astronaut Mark Watney and his desperate efforts to survive being stranded on Mars when the rest of his crew evacuates (believing Mark to have died). Mark is left on Mars with a temporary shelter, no means of communication and very little food - he doesn’t have the resources to survive until the next Mars mission arrives and he has no way of letting anyone back on Earth know that he’s still alive. In Mark’s own words:
“If the Oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death. So yeah. I’m fucked.”
So, right from page 1, things are looking fairly dire. Optimistic beyond all reason, however, Mark proceeds to tackle the situation head-on, using all of his engineering and scientific know-how trying to keep himself alive in an incredibly inhospitable environment.
Mars - quite far away from Earth, as it turns out.
To be completely honest, science fiction is not normally my cup of tea. I find that storylines often play second fiddle to the author’s self-congratulatory explanations of all their clever future-tech ideas. The characters are often weak and the writing style so clunky that you don’t get sucked into the story in the way you would like. Good sci-fi, however, is rare and precious and should always be celebrated. The Martian is very, very good sci-fi.
The Martian is not this kind of Sci-Fi.
When I was younger, I loved Jurassic Park and I felt that Michael Crichton had included just the right amount of genetic and paleontological and biological background to the story, such that the whole thing seemed possible. Not exactly probable, or even remotely likely but possible. The Martian works the same way - author Andy Weir clearly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to space travel (as well as chemistry, physics and various other fields of science that Mark Watney depends on throughout the book)so that everything in the book seems possible - again, not exactly probable, but just possible enough to allow complete suspension of disbelief. As with Jurassic Park, the science provides an important background to the story, but that’s not what the story’s about - The Martian is about people and survival-against-all-odds, and it’s fairly intense stuff.
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| Apparently the movie adaptation is coming out later this year. This could actually be a wee bit awesome. |
Mark Watney is far from the two-dimensional cliched characters you may have encountered in sci-fi before. Mark has a very clear personality, which really shows through in the first-person narrative used throughout most of the book. Mark is obviously something of a bright spark (they don’t let just any old moron go to Mars, clearly), with a talent for thinking his way into unique fixes for life-threatening situations. He’s sarcastic and witty with an unstoppable sense of humour and a very stubborn refusal to quit. The situations Mark finds himself in are extremely dangerous and clearly very serious, but he refuses to take himself seriously. Mark’s personality infuses the whole book with a sense of dark comedy, which provides moments of pleasant relief from all the oh-my-god-he’s -gonna-die while also making it even more stressful because Mark is so likable that you really do want things to end well for him.
Having said that, I suspect that Mark Watney is such a strong character with such a clear voice, that this may also work against the book at times - I loved Mark, but I’ve read a few scathing reviews of this book where people found him irritating. And if you don’t like Mark, you won’t like the book. His cheery attitude and self-deprecating jokiness is inescapable - the story is told very much in Mark’s words. Words like:
“I tested the brackets by hitting them with rocks. This kind of sophistication is what we interplanetary scientists are known for”
“Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped”
“After I board Ares 4, before talking to NASA, I will take control of a craft in international waters without permission. That makes me a pirate! A Space Pirate!”
After coming into this with extremely low expectations, I loved The Martian. It’s a well-written, fast-moving adventure that’s charming and captivating and terrifying. Plus, I learned all sorts of things about interplanetary travel and am fairly confident that I now know how to create water using flammable gases and an open flame. The Martian was so absorbing that I read the whole thing in one sitting, completely neglecting my children for half a day (they don’t seem too badly scarred and I figure that they’re well compensated by their mother’s newfound ability to create water in the vacuum of space).
This was a brilliant read.
9/10
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