Published 2014.
“Yes, of course duct
tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and
should be worshiped.”
“’Watney is our
botanist and engineer. And don’t talk about him in the past tense.’
‘Engineer? Like
Scotty?’
‘Kind of,’ Beck said.
‘He fixes stuff.’
‘I bet that’s coming
in handy now.’
‘Yeah, no shit.’”
This book could have had another title: “How to Grow
Potatoes on Mars”…
SF boasts a range of recurring images that are symbolical
of the major concerns and underlying its angst. Are the most familiar and
iconic of these images the alien, the futuristic world, the spaceship, the IA
machine? I think not. The image that I most associate with SF is “being
stranded on an alien planet”. That’s for me quintessential SF. Does “The
Martian” belong to this category? Yes. Is it good SF? No. Why? Read on.
Top-notch SF gains power from their
characteristic of both revealing knowledge and withholding it at the same time,
i.e., they’re familiar, while at the same time they remain estranged (see links below)
from us in some other important aspect. Take the “Being stranded on an alien
planet” image. The “artifacts” of this image in terms of putting it on the page
are numerous. It’s supposed to operate by understandable mechanical and
electronic principles, as well as Biology, Physics, etc. This image derives
from both mythological and technological themes, i.e., there’s room in the
spaceship image for Icarus… As a long time SF devotee, I’ve come to regard SF
as having odd-ball bifurcated ramifications, drawing at the same time on myth
and modern technology.
Why did they make a movie out of it? Was it because
of the above-average character development (The Mark Watney that emerged at the
end of the story was not that much different than the character at the outset.
No depression? No lethargy? He’s a 24/7 human dynamo!)? Was it because of the
atrocious writing (at times I thought I was reading SF from the 30s…)? Was it the
purely engineering aspects? Was the story improved by all the
back-of-the-envelope calculations, the physics, orbital mechanics, or somesuch?
I’m not sure. The whole shebang felt gimmicky to me. Incidentally. What’s with
the “pirate-ninja” as a unit of measurement? As an engineer myself, I believe
this is utter nonsense. Credibility-wise is plain stupid. The rate of energy
used over time is power, and we already have units for that: watts. Duh!
If I were to be candid, I’d say this a pleasant
and inoffensive entertainment, and in the traditional words, it kept me turning
pages. Weir must improve on his ability at handling characters. There are
moments of utter glibness. This an inferior coffee-table production, not that
illuminating, but fun nonetheless. Buy it as a present, not as textbook on
Physics and Chemistry.
Warning. Rant follows.
If I were to be mean, which I won’t, I’d say this
book is probably one of the lamest, most mediocre SF books ever written. Competing
with it is another famous example of bad SF: “Ancillary Justice” by Ann Leckie. If I were some sort of soap-opera brain
damaged victim who microwaved plastic and drank diet soda, maybe this book
would be for me. Someone should tell Weir that foisting such a horrible and
puerile abortion on the public and call it SF is a disservice to that same SF.
NB: The movie HAS to be better than this (or
maybe not). There’s still hope. Ridley Scott is directing it… I'm curious to know
how he’ll will make the transition of what is mostly Watney's thoughts into
some kind of narration.
NB2: Examples of relatively recent good SF: “The Adjacent” by Christopher Priest, “Academic Exercises” by K. J. Parker
(aka Tom Holt), “The Folding Knife” by K. J. Parker, “Wolves” by Simon Ings, “After the Apocalypse” by Maureen F.
McHugh, “China Mountain Zhang” by Maureen F.
McHugh, “The Eye With Which the Universe
Beholds Itself” by Ian Sales, “Adrift on the Sea of Rains” by Ian
Sales.
Rating this novel was a pain in the neck. Let
me see:
5 stars for everything that was behind the
book’s conception: space travel, orbital dynamics, relativistic physics,
astronomy, and software engineering (”they
want me to launch ‘hexedit’ on the rover’s computer, then open the file
/usr/lib/habcomm.so, scroll until the index reading on the left of the screen
is 2AAE5, then replace the bytes there with a 141-byte sequence NASA will send
in the next message. Fair enough.”) Working out all the math and physics
for Mark’s problems and solutions must have been fun.
0 stars for execution (not to put too fine a
point on it, terrible).
Average = 2.5 stars. And that’s that, folks.
SF = Speculative Fiction.
