The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 3/5 cats
this book is basically just a really long SAT question. and i so hope the movie is just matt damon sitting at a table doing equations for two and a half hours.
oh but first, as promised, here are the photos of me being an astronaut this past weekend.
zooooom!
i am orbiting the eeeeeeaaaarttthh!!
i did a really good job at astronauting and i didn’t need to do math even once! (although i started experiencing cramped space-madness after about 6 hours, so i doubt i’m going to mars anytime soon.)
so many people i know LOVED this book. and so many people i know HATED this book. and as is usually the case with rabidly divisive books, i find myself smack in the middle, perplexed (but pleased) by the passion on both sides. it’s a fine book – a pretty good balance of things i enjoyed and things i enjoyed less.
things i enjoyed less:
the reason i don’t read a lot of sci-fi is because my grasp on sci is pretty slippery. and this book is one long celebration of math and chemistry and physics and etc. and also airlocks. i don’t like airlocks. which is a weird thing to not like, i suppose, but the same way Moby-Dick; or, The Whale bored me when melville fangirled over rope for a million pages, this one izza lotta descriptions of spacecraft bits and the mechanics of airlocks and stuff that’s wicked important if you are being an astronaut but is boring to me reading about it and i totally glazed over whenever anything had to be secured onto an airlock and depressurized.
but what’s really frustrating is that for all the attention to detail/accuracy when it came to the math (i assume/i trust), the book’s pretty flippant with the psychology. watney is all relentless optimism and unflagging “can do” attitude and dick jokes, with very few signs of depression or fear that isn’t phrased in the form of a joke. weir tried to blanket over this “lack of meltdown” with that brief mention that watney is the class clown whose jokiness becomes heightened under stress, but seriously – there are more tears in any given episode of project runway than in this book about a man abandoned on mars and left completely alone for 2 years facing ever-escalating dangers and setbacks.
and the writing is definitely problematic. there is so much repetition, and so many times watney starts off a paragraph with “remember” as in “remember when i mentioned this-and-that?? well, now it is coming back into play in this situation razzmatazz!” it’s not great for narrative flow, and it’s a little insulting to assume your readership can’t remember things that happened during the course of the book. and this tic is doubly perplexing when you “remember” (remember???) that watney’s entries are ostensibly directed at other astronauts/scientists who wouldn’t need science explained to them, and certainly wouldn’t need the prod to remember it.
the ending is bad and too abrupt. there’s not much else to say about that.
but there are also things i enjoyed:
i love survival books, so all the high-stakes DIY macgyver “lemme fix it with glue!” stuff was entertaining, when it didn’t require me to recall stuff i learned failed to learn in high school. i also love lateral thinking puzzles, so i appreciated watney’s process of arriving at unconventional solutions to problems i will never face. bonus points for when the fix was some unpretty punk rock janked-up solution, especially when it freaked out the scientists on the ground. and i like watney’s blithe attitude – to a point –
To them, equipment failure is terrifying. To me, it’s “Tuesday.”
i preferred it when he was being cowboy-practical to when weir was forcing the humor. which – i know a lot of readers have a problem with the quality of the humor, but as someone who says “that’s what she said” pretty often daily, the juvenile nature of the humor didn’t bother me, and i did giggle at his consumer review of his laptop:
Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10.
but it just felt like wherever weir could stick a joke, he’d stick a joke, and it became over-bedazzled with humor. although, considering this book treats watney’s situation as reality t.v. for those still on the ground, and reality t.v. tends to amplify its participants with “must be entertaining at all times” fervor, this isn’t entirely inappropriate after all.
another frustration i had was how much i enjoyed all the stuff that was happening on the ground and in the Hermes. it was much more interesting than equation-boy and his boob-doodling, and it was better-written: the humor was more successfully integrated, the characters were more convincingly human, and that’s frustrating because it shows he can do it. so that’s a “thing i enjoyed” buried under a complaint, i guess. but i did genuinely enjoy all the non-mars scenes, and when it would cut back to watney, i would groan like it was a bran chapter in ASOIAF.
so that’s me: middle-of-the-road karen who sees the book’s flaws, but mostly enjoyed reading it.
tl;dr: a fun book interrupted by math.
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so, i saw the movie a couple of days ago, and i can finally weigh in on a comparison of the two. i’m definitely glad i read the book first, but at the end of the day, i’m not sure if there’s an answer about which is “better.”
book wins:
some of my favorite harrowing “OH NO” moments from the book did not make it into the movie (like that sudden realization which sends him scurrying outside for a long time), and also some of my favorite solutions were absent (hair). and while there were way fewer perilous moments in the movie, there was a zillion times more emotional response to the problems that did occur. which is points for realism, but watching people cry or otherwise emote on the big screen is as boring and time-wasting as reading about math, so one negates the other. but overall, the most interesting stuff got cut from the movie – stuff on mars, stuff on hermes, stuff on ground, etc.
movie wins:
having a montage to look at while math goes on and on in a voice-over is way more interesting than me kidding myself reading the math paragraphs several times like suddenly i’m gonna get it. also, matt damon delivers the jokey bits in a way that seems natural, and there are fewer jokes overall. (although in some cases, they cut the wrong ones. #aquaman) and i guess that iron man scene. that was pretty cool.
so it’s kind of a tie. the movie is basically the cliffs notes version of the book – it gives you the basic gist of it, but you’ll miss out on some really great scenes if you are like “book??? too boring tl;dr.” and if you just read the book you won’t get to see the airlocks in all their glory.
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i want to see this movie, but i know it’ll kill my motivation to read the book, so it looks like this puppy is gonna have to be my airplane book this weekend. as a bonus, with my window seat i can pretend that i am an astronaut myself, albeit a really incompetent one.
i apologize to my seatmates in advance.
book – check
astronaut ice cream pellets – check
and off we go!
