psocoptera

I 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