Book Review: The Martian by Andy Weir

The Martian is soon to be a major motion picture starring Matt Damon. I know this not only because the cover the book tells me so, but because I saw commercials for the movie this weekend during football. Not that this matters much to me, I will not see the movie until it is available on HBO or Netflix or something similar, because we pretty much never see movies in the theater.

However, this is not a movie review (which would be really hard as the movie is not out yet) but a book review. And the book is out. And the book is good. And I would totally recommend reading it.

With the exception of Gibson and Stephenson, it seems that most science fiction I read is more like fantasy set in space. The Martian is more like a Gibson novel, or the first part of Stephenson’s Seveneves, in that it is essentially set in the now, with one minor, though important difference. In Andy Weir’s The Martian, we have manned space travel (COOL) that includes the ability to have manned missions to Mars. But other than that, there is nothing that feels especially “futuristic” or “science fiction-y” about the book.

That in itself, I think, is a great compliment, as most of the book is set on Mars, told from the point of view of a guy who is trying to survive on Mars. None of that technology exists. None. And yet Weir writes it so well, that it feels like it does. It feels more like he got a sneak peek at NASA’s R&D department than that he made this stuff up. And that is hard, really hard.

But the other great thing about The Martian is that none of that technology, no matter how central to the story gets in the way of the story. In the end, this is a book about people, about what people will do in the worst of circumstances, and the way the entire world can pull together for one person. On some level, reading this book, I feel like I get a sense of what it was like to live through the first moon landing.

As humans, and as Americans in particular, I think, we have come to revere those who will risk the many to save the one. We honor those who will get many more people killed in order to bring back the bodies of those already dead (see We Were Soldiers Once…and Young). The Martian plays on that notion. In fact, my one complaint with the book is that the one person in the story who does not want to risk the lives of six to save one is painted as a coward, and the closest thing to a villain the story has.

The reader is never inside the head of that character, which I think is the part the bothers me the most. I would have loved to gotten a more nuanced exploration of trying to make that calculation, and of being willing to be the person who consigned one man to certain death instead of risk the lives of seven individuals, because I think that is a dynamic worth exploring.

But, even without that, The Martian is a great read. It is a story of survival and ingenuity. And with any luck, the book and the movie will have people voting to give NASA a real budget again. Because really, the most important thing a science fiction book can do, I think, is to spur our real life science to better to go one better than the fiction.