The Martian by Andy Weir

Posted by: Redhead on: December 11, 2014

• In: Andy Weir
• 20 Comments

The Martian by Andy Wier

published in February 2014

where I got it: purchased new

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I don’t know why I skipped this book back when it came out.  I remember it got a lot of hype, and that I’d recently been burning on some other titles being overhyped. Anyways, the book recently came out in paperback, and was chosen for the December book for my book club. The hype had long since died down, and I’d be discussing the book among friends, so the time was ripe for me to dive in.

 

Let’s get this out of way first – I absolutely, freakin’ LOVED Andy Weir’s The Martian. I’d sit down, planning to read a chapter or two, or maybe 20 pages, and before I knew it an hour had gone by and I’d devoured a chunk of the book and bitten of half my fingernails in the process. This is one helluva page turner, and Weir pulls the best kind of trick possible: You really don’t know what’s going to happen until the very last few pages.

 

The blurb on the back of the book sums up the basics nicely:

 

“Six days ago astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars.

Now he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there.

After a dust storm forces his crew to evacuate the planet while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded on Mars’s surface, with no way to signal Earth that he’s alive. And even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone years before a rescue could arrive.

Changes are, though, Mark won’t have time to starve to death.”

From the very first sentence, the question becomes is he going to survive, or die? Will this book have a happy ending or a sad one?  Mark’s first priority, obviously, is how to not die quickly.  How will he make sure he has air to breathe inside the habitat? How we he ensure that he has enough water to drink? Food is another issue, especially since starving is a matter of when, not if.  Most of the book is all Mark Watney all the time, so your enjoyment of the book depends greatly on if you like him or not.

 

Personally, I couldn’t get enough of his gallows humor, his smarts,  his snark, and his impatient streak. He makes the best of a shitty situation and realizes that when you don’t have to get permission from NASA, you can take apart any damn thing you want and put it back together however you want.  He kept his cool in a situation that would have me screaming, crying, and having a nervous breakdown. But then again, do we really know how honest he’s being in his journal? He could be crying himself to sleep for all we know. Adding the variable of a possibly unreliable narrator actually makes his story all the most interest, in my opinion.

 

This happens pretty early in the book, so I don’t feel it’s a spoiler: through satellite imagery, NASA discovers that Mark is alive.  They can watch him, but they can’t get a message to him.  Mark Watney becomes a media sensation, everyone wants to know about the man left behind, and suddenly “can we save him?” becomes the most important and most expensive question. Weir throws some big questions at the reader:  How much is one life worth? How should his crewmates be told that he’s still alive?  When (if ever) is it moral to tell someone to track their research and then lie down and die?

 

Regardless of if you like Mark’s personality or not, the more you get to know him, the more you will want him to live.  You’ll want his contraptions to work, you’ll be rooting for him, you’ll want to hear his next joke, you’ll want him to not go crazy, you will want him to live.

 

Something that was a plus for me, but seemed to turn a lot of readers off was the straight up engineering math.  Mark’s survival depends on using scarce resources in just the right way. How fast does the oxygenator work?  How can he get hydrogen, and how much will he need to make a certain amount of water?   How much battery power will you get from so many solar panels if they are only charging at 80% efficiency? There are a lot of paragraphs of how will he turn ABC into a specific quantity of XYZ, and the math gets very detailed. I’ve been told a lot of readers didn’t like this, but it actually worked very well for me, and even Mark jokes about how much math he’s doing. Algebra word problems all day long?  No wonder he doesn’t go crazy, he’s in engineering heaven!

 

Like I said at the beginning of this review, The Martian is a freakin’ brilliant book. The further I got into it, the more I enjoyed it.  Mark Watney is obviously the main character, but we meet others as well, who are as developed as time allows. There are some other plot points that proved fascinating as well.  Weir took what was at first a completely binary idea (0 = he lives, 1 = he dies), and turned it into an unquantifiable emotional roller coaster.

 

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So, how’s it end? I’m not going to tell you. But I will tell you that I cried, a lot, and then I desperately wanted to watch the Apollo 13 movie, (damn you Netflix for not having it on streaming!) and the movie Moon (which I was able to borrow from a friend). Somehow I thought those two movies would give me some kind of closure. The Martian is the kind of book that once you know how it ends, you really don’t need to ever read it again, because it has one of those big reveals that you never forget.  I’ll never forget the ending of this book.  And I can’t wait to read it again.

Tags: Mars, science fiction