book: The Martian
May. 7th, 2014 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraI started reading Andy Weir's The Martian yesterday and couldn't put it down. Luckily it was a fast read. The titular Martian is a stranded astronaut trying to survive; his story is tense and, in some spots, very funny. Recommended to people who like classic hard science fiction in the Arthur C. Clarke vein.
That said, this is a very simple story. Dude wants to survive and overcomes various technical challenges. I kept expecting a major left turn - for some higher-than-survival priority to emerge, making him and us question whether he *should* survive at the expense of _____ - but, no, it's pretty much technical challenges from page 1 to page 369. Everyone who disliked Gravity because a real astronaut would never be sad or scared will love Mark, who is pretty much a survival-bot. Even when he has a small emotional moment (crying when he makes contact with Earth again, or observing the emptiness and ancient-ness of the landscape) we don't really go deep into it, and are back to practicalities in a paragraph. At the end of the book, when he gets a dramatic view, his response to the planet is "fuck you" (for trying to kill him), and yet he never thinks about whether he regrets being part of the mission. We learn almost nothing about his life before Mars (his parents are alive, in Chicago, and worried, but don't even get names), and whenever he mentions missing something from Earth it's like the most generic possible thing (music other than a teammate's disco mix, "women", but not any particular women, just "women"). This is probably pretty realistic - I'm sure NASA *does* select for unflappable, non-self-reflective types - but even a couple of character details that weren't the most obvious choices would have made him more interesting as a person, instead of just a predicament-solver, and I also think that, realistically, NASA would be interested in his notes on the psychological effects of long-term solo survival, so a little bit more introspection about his situation wouldn't be out-of-character.
Worse, this lack of depth extends to the characters on Earth, who don't have the excuse of being specially selected for relentless good cheer. The most conflict outside of man-against-the-elements comes up when the NASA team have to make a choice of whether to risk the rest of Mark's crew for a chance to rescue him, and, you know, I felt like that was a *legitimate question*, whether it would be more tragic to get five people killed trying to save one than to give up on the one, but in the book this gets brushed off with "if you had balls" you'd choose the risk. The most moving part of the book for me, despite all of Mark's brushes with death, was when the Chinese space agency decides to give up a scientific probe that hundreds of people have been working on for many years to give the unreplaceable-for-political-reasons booster rocket to the rescue effort, which, wah, totally made me want to write fix-it fanfic about Mark leading the campaign to get that probe into space after all. Even one tough press-conference question about the US being willing to spend a hundred million dollars to send food through space to one volunteer astronaut on Mars but not, like, overseas to hundred thousand kids in the Sahel, would have made the world around the story feel a little more complex and real. Mark's closing thoughts that "assholes don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do, so I had billions of people on my side" was... frustrating, I mean, I feel like there is some space between "one life is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and the risk of more lives" and "assholes don't care". (Which is why I liked the Chinese space agency guy who was actually willing to say "okay, we're doing this, but this comes at a net cost for human knowledge and that sucks" so much.)
This all sounds highly critical, so let me reiterate: I really enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it to others. There is some great Apollo 13-style kludging and crazy feats of survival engineering and the part where he goes and salvages Pathfinder and Sojourner is amazing. Just, like, a thousand more words of psychological depth, sprinkled throughout, could have been the seasoning that really made it more than a fun read. (Even if part of me secretly wanted it to be a novel-length Under the Greying Sea, which is still one of the most powerful disaster-in-space stories I've ever read.) I think The Martian is first thing I've read this year that is plausibly Hugo eligible, so I'm tagging it, and, I mean, it does have many of the features I look for in nominees (gripping, I want other people to read it), but I'm lukewarm about wanting to put it on a ballot.
(Hey, local Mars expert![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ali_wildgoose, I would love to hear your thoughts on this book, either from the technical side or the story side.)
That said, this is a very simple story. Dude wants to survive and overcomes various technical challenges. I kept expecting a major left turn - for some higher-than-survival priority to emerge, making him and us question whether he *should* survive at the expense of _____ - but, no, it's pretty much technical challenges from page 1 to page 369. Everyone who disliked Gravity because a real astronaut would never be sad or scared will love Mark, who is pretty much a survival-bot. Even when he has a small emotional moment (crying when he makes contact with Earth again, or observing the emptiness and ancient-ness of the landscape) we don't really go deep into it, and are back to practicalities in a paragraph. At the end of the book, when he gets a dramatic view, his response to the planet is "fuck you" (for trying to kill him), and yet he never thinks about whether he regrets being part of the mission. We learn almost nothing about his life before Mars (his parents are alive, in Chicago, and worried, but don't even get names), and whenever he mentions missing something from Earth it's like the most generic possible thing (music other than a teammate's disco mix, "women", but not any particular women, just "women"). This is probably pretty realistic - I'm sure NASA *does* select for unflappable, non-self-reflective types - but even a couple of character details that weren't the most obvious choices would have made him more interesting as a person, instead of just a predicament-solver, and I also think that, realistically, NASA would be interested in his notes on the psychological effects of long-term solo survival, so a little bit more introspection about his situation wouldn't be out-of-character.
Worse, this lack of depth extends to the characters on Earth, who don't have the excuse of being specially selected for relentless good cheer. The most conflict outside of man-against-the-elements comes up when the NASA team have to make a choice of whether to risk the rest of Mark's crew for a chance to rescue him, and, you know, I felt like that was a *legitimate question*, whether it would be more tragic to get five people killed trying to save one than to give up on the one, but in the book this gets brushed off with "if you had balls" you'd choose the risk. The most moving part of the book for me, despite all of Mark's brushes with death, was when the Chinese space agency decides to give up a scientific probe that hundreds of people have been working on for many years to give the unreplaceable-for-political-reasons booster rocket to the rescue effort, which, wah, totally made me want to write fix-it fanfic about Mark leading the campaign to get that probe into space after all. Even one tough press-conference question about the US being willing to spend a hundred million dollars to send food through space to one volunteer astronaut on Mars but not, like, overseas to hundred thousand kids in the Sahel, would have made the world around the story feel a little more complex and real. Mark's closing thoughts that "assholes don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do, so I had billions of people on my side" was... frustrating, I mean, I feel like there is some space between "one life is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and the risk of more lives" and "assholes don't care". (Which is why I liked the Chinese space agency guy who was actually willing to say "okay, we're doing this, but this comes at a net cost for human knowledge and that sucks" so much.)
This all sounds highly critical, so let me reiterate: I really enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it to others. There is some great Apollo 13-style kludging and crazy feats of survival engineering and the part where he goes and salvages Pathfinder and Sojourner is amazing. Just, like, a thousand more words of psychological depth, sprinkled throughout, could have been the seasoning that really made it more than a fun read. (Even if part of me secretly wanted it to be a novel-length Under the Greying Sea, which is still one of the most powerful disaster-in-space stories I've ever read.) I think The Martian is first thing I've read this year that is plausibly Hugo eligible, so I'm tagging it, and, I mean, it does have many of the features I look for in nominees (gripping, I want other people to read it), but I'm lukewarm about wanting to put it on a ballot.
(Hey, local Mars expert
ali_wildgoose, I would love to hear your thoughts on this book, either from the technical side or the story side.)
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no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 06:07 pm (UTC)And I feel like you're being unfair to the "do we risk the five to save the one" thing. There's like, one person peddling the "you don't have the balls" line vs. a bunch of other people who make objectively good cases for not doing it, whose cases I don't think the book dismisses. It just that it so happens that the people with most direct control of the ship's thrusters are the other astronauts, and they, not implausibly, are coming from a very ‘leave no man behind’ outlook.
Generally, I was just happy that all the questions you talk about were allowed to exist at the edges - and they very much were. The ‘how much is too much?’ question is raised again and again, by questions at press conferences, by the chinese scientists, by the NASA decision-makers, and all that. The book doesn't give us an answer, and Mark is clearly not the sort to ask a lot of serious introspective questions about this, but at least we aren't subjected to the pretense that the questions don't exist.
Yeah, I wouldn't have minded something psychologically deeper, but I'm okay with this book setting out to be something else.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-08 01:33 am (UTC)Also apparently he self-published this as an e-book before Random House acquired it, which a) makes me doubt that it is Hugo-eligible after all, and b) makes me wonder whether the Random House version is in fact identical to the earlier edition, or if it's been professionally edited since then. Did you (or anyone else reading this) read it when he self-pubbed it? A few word choices threw me even for the voice of the character - would a professional at least thirty years in the future say something was "gay" because it was named for the goddess of rainbows, or refer to his modifications of the ascent vehicle as "all kinds of rape"? The self-pubbed thing makes me wonder if there were more questionable lines and this is the cleaned up version, or what.
As far as whether I'm being unfair - the "if you had balls" line is literally the "last word" of its scene. And you're right that someone does ask about the cost at a press conference, but it's a pretty abstract, gentle question compared with a phrasing like "is this how we should spend a hundred million dollars of *food aid to the starving*". Maybe the questions exist but they're also dismissed.
But I did like it! I mean, I read the hell out of it, and there are some brilliant moments (when he's rolling the airlock, hahaha). Two thumbs up to the wacky engineering adventures of Mark the survival-bot. But it was just weird to get to the end of the book and realize that I had *no idea* whether Mark had, like, met the goals that made him become a Mars astronaut in the first place, because we just have no idea about that.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-08 02:14 am (UTC)i didn't read the pre-random-house version. i had lost track of what he was doing until i saw a review of the novel at the AV Club a couple months back and decided to have a look.
and yeah, fair enough on the other things.
no subject
Date: 2014-05-07 07:14 pm (UTC)