i also really enjoyed this. it's true that Mark doesn't have a lot of background or characterization, but i feel like his (characteristically Andy-Weir-esque) voice is a lot of what drives the novel and makes it readable, and along the way does give him a fair amount of characterization. he's a survival-bot, but he's a survival bot with a particular kind of attitude, and a particular set of emotional responses that show us what about him allows him to stay in survival-bot mode for the duration of the novel.
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.
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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.