Yet another science fiction novel that has surprisingly enthralled me. I believe I read it in three sittings, which isn’t common for me these days. It was the humor that made The Martian un-put-downable for me. It made me laugh throughout the entire book and endeared me to Mark Watney so that I had to know what would happen to him, even though I had already watched the movie a few years prior.
As someone with extraordinarily limited knowledge of astrophysics and botany (or basically anything science-related), I can’t pretend to understand everything that was said, but Weir dumbed it down enough for me to get the gist of what was happening. Andy Weir totally had me convinced that he knew what he was talking about and that the things Watney pulled off in the novel could theoretically work in real life, though it was hard for me to believe that someone could be that smart and that well-rounded. I’ve read that the biggest scientific impossibility was the initial storm that was the impetus for the entire novel, stranding Watney on Mars. That kind of storm couldn’t happen in Mars’ atmosphere, so Weir had to invent something that would be catastrophic enough to knock Watney down and hide him from his fellow astronauts. But according to people who know a lot more than I do, pretty much everything else in the book was well-researched and at least plausible, which is impressive.
I didn’t get a lot of closure from the ending of the book; I wanted the narrative to keep going. Apparently, Weir’s self-published version he originally put out includes an ending a bit similar to the one that appears in the movie, and I do think that would have helped make the ending feel a bit less abrupt.
Regardless, the book is better than the movie. The humor is a lot more prevalent and more effective in the book. Though I do recognize that the good spirits in the novel are not very realistic for someone in such a depressing and isolating situation, I thought the format of log entries made it make more sense than if the novel were written in a normal narrative style. I can see Watney putting on a bit of a show for his log entries that he hoped would last longer than him, not displaying or dramatizing his more depressive episodes. And those moments were also more common in the film, which also made sense because it would have been odder not to include in the different medium of film. I do have a bone to pick with the ending scene in the movie. The ending attempted rescue scene is so much more believable and less dramatic in the novel—apparently not dramatic enough for Hollywood. For a story that attempts to be as realistic as possible, they kind of lost the plot there.
