An Old Man's Review of "The Martian"

The Martian does two things exceptionally well: science and suspense.  Because of the latter, it was hard to put down, and because of the former, I wasn't put off.  For a lot of people out there, those two things are enough, and like "Gravity" and "128 Hours," it would make a very watchable 2 hour movie.  Given its timeliness, with the Mars mission somewhere lurking in the public discussion and imagination (waiting to explode, someday, I hope), it could be a great box office success, and even, significantly, a catalyst for bringing the real plausibility of a manned mission to Mars higher in the zeitgeist.

If you're a person who grew up on the near-entirety of Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, Clark, Tolkien, and King, there's one of two things you've grown to expect from a really epic work: story.  And characters.  Well, this one's got some good stuff, but not those.  He's most like Clark in his strict adherence to hard science.

Another plus was Weir's use of believable potential challenges deriving from the setting itself and natural course of events to drive the action without invoking unlikely externals.  Nicely done, Andy!

But as literature, it left me wanting.  In "128 Hours," (I didn't read the book), the flash-forward in his vision to his child was a powerful and memorable part of the movie for me, and perhaps when they make the movie, they'll find a way to humanize Watney (the main character) way better than Weir did in the book.

The kicker: I'm pretty sure if I tried my hand at writing a sci-fi novel, it'd end up more like this book than one of the masters', who are able to work their magical wordsmithing to get me inside their characters and their worlds, and because they had more to work with (outside abject reality, which Weir stays well inside), they were able to make me co-create the other-worldliness into something realer.  Mars is enough like a desert, enough like the moon, enough like something I know that it brings the real world in with it when invoked.

Another cool thing about The Martian is that it can be buzzed through in a day for someone who knows science or just trusts Weir's math (which I did, no reason to re-calculate anything) and the science, which is also something I'm familiar enough with to follow along fine.  It's a nice lightning-fast read that lets you read it as a break from whatever else you may be in the middle of, so that's cool.  But it's not one of those books that breaks my heart from being over because I want to spend more time in its world, which I use as my own personal hallmark of a masterpiece of literature (for ME, not for the world).  I think that's more of the bottom line -- literature is what it is to an individual (or even a small following) and the collective is much less meaningful.