Book Review: The Martian by Andy Weir
Andy Weir’s The Martian might be the most exhaustively researched work of science fiction I’ve ever read. It’s certainly the most exhausting.
The book, set in a near future where manned missions to Mars have become more or less routine, centers around Mark Watney, a NASA astronaut who becomes stranded on the red planet after an accident on the surface leads his crew to believe him dead. Largely told in the form of Watney’s journal entries, The Martian follows the intrepid astronaut’s struggle to survive alone on an inhospitable world, aided only (for the most part) by the supplies at hand and his own scientific ingenuity.
And that’s it. There’s no sci-fi fantasy romp in the offing here — our hero is not addled by bug-eyed aliens or romanced by Martian princesses — The Martian is about as verisimilar as a story about a man stranded alone on Mars can be. Indeed, Weir apparently spent a great deal of time making sure he got the book’s science right, and The Martian has been justly praised for its commitment to realism. That commitment — which makes the book so worthy of admiration — is also, unfortunately, what makes it such terrible art.
Before I elaborate on that, I should stress that I have no problem with so-called “hard” science fiction (a slippery term which, as critic Peter Nicholls has noted, can encompass just about anything). Technical accuracy can and often does enlarge and enliven these fictive worlds, and certainly The Martian wouldn’t be enjoying the current runaway success it’s having (a film starring Matt Damon is slated for 2015) without its seeming death grip on believability.
The problem is that the book’s copious amounts of scientific minutiae don’t just serve the story; they are the story. The Martian is over-researched and under-written, and Weir is so enamored of mathematical formulae and tortuous descriptions of physical processes that one wonders why he didn’t just dispense with the pleading “A Novel” subtitle and simply write a how-to manual about surviving on Mars instead.
The novel, in other words, simply fails as a novel. In the moments when Weir cannot rely on Wikipedia as a source for his plot, things quickly get bush league. Take our hero, astronaut Mark Watney, for instance. Thrust into an impossible and almost certainly fatal situation, he cheerfully hurdles every obstacle Mars can throw his way, thanks to an unfailing MacGyver-like brilliance and near-Vulcan sangfroid that, frankly, beggars belief. About half-way through the book I wasn’t gripped with concern over Watney’s continued survival so much as I was curious about what physics textbook he was going to quote while yawning off the next non-crisis he encounters.
Is it impressive? Definitely. Is it realistic? Sure, maybe. Watney is (bloody conveniently as it turns out) a botanist and mechanical engineer in addition to being an astronaut after all, but his character comes across as more of a wise-cracking calculator than a human being. (Of those wise-cracks, which largely consist of shouting “Yay!” and pontificating on 70’s sitcoms with all the fresh wit of a dilettante comedian performing at an open mic night in 1988, I dare not linger).
Things get no better in the The Martian‘s primary subplot, which focuses on the NASA team who are desperately scrambling to figure out a way to get Watney home. If the book’s earlier focus on optimal calorie consumption and how to profitably grow potatoes on Mars proved too exciting for you, dear reader, fear not — there are plenty of scenes involving bureaucratic wrangling here, all guaranteed to lower your pulse.
Just don’t expect memorable characters — as always, the science is the story’s main protagonist. Weir begrudgingly distinguishes among the NASA team by assigning exactly one identifying trait to each member: one official swears like a sailor, for instance, another is Hindu. As with Watney, these characters aren’t so much characters as they are empty vessels created for the sole purpose of conveying scientific factoids, a duty which they perform both admirably and boringly.
These scenes back on Earth do provide a pleasant respite from Watney’s immature, protracted soliloquizing, but that’s about all that can be said about them. If one were being generous, one might say that they have a certain cinematic quality. If one were not being so generous, one might say that they read like the author has seen a lot of action and sci-fi movies, and is simply regurgitating cliches in the hopes that his readers won’t notice.
The Martian is not uniformly awful. Weir’s prose is breezy enough when it’s not bogged down by jargon, and he effectively conveys a genuine love of the scientific method and those who practice it. But he never seems as comfortable with people as he does with equations, and that’s where the utter believability of his world vanishes. We only get the most cursory glimpses into Astronaut Watney’s psyche, a man who at one point in the novel has been stranded completely alone on a dead planet for well over a year. Certainly he’s a professional. Certainly he’s busy trying to stay alive. But is he ever afraid? Angry? Contemplative? The book doesn’t really care. And in the end, neither did I.
Note: this review was originally published in 2014.
