The Martian

I love this fucking book. 

Like seriously.  I love it.  I want to have its tiny, accident-prone, red-haired babies. 

This is the first book in months to inspire such feelings in me, where I just want to sit and read all day and do nothing else.  I’ve been squeezing in extra minutes everywhere just to make it happen – ten minutes here and there on my plan time, during the 6 minutes I have between classes during the day, the 30 seconds it takes my coffee to reheat because I’ve abandoned it in favor of Mark Watney…

I love The Martian. 

I have always loved to read, but let me be honest: I don’t have a lot of free time lately, and most of what I’ve been reading the last few months has been fanfiction. 

Not a ton of pride there.  I’ve learned to count it as a “real” book since that tends to happen when you invest a truly disgusting number of hours into reading hundreds of thousands of words.  But a lot of people, myself pre-March 2015 included, don’t really count that.  Check my list – I haven’t read near the number of ‘actual’ books in the past six months as this time last year. 

The Martian changed all that.  

I read The Martian in about six days.  For most, that’s ridiculously fast for close to 400 pages.  It’s not for me -- and I’m not trying to brag; that’s just how fast I read.  If I made the time, I could probably read War and Peace in about a week too. *shrugs*

Anyway, speed isn’t a good indicator of how much I enjoyed a book.  But dreaming about a book… that’s a pretty strong, honest indicator, and I can happily report that every night since finishing The Martian has been full of vague impressions of astronauts and red dust. 

In a way, I’m glad I don’t remember the specifics – The Martian is, after all, a survival story, man vs. nature at its most foreign and harsh.  I really don’t want to actively ‘live’ the accident that strands Watney on Mars nor any of the wide variety of events, accidents, mistakes, and just plain bad luck that contributes to his barely eked out existence on the red planet. 

But if my brain is so worked up over this story that it has to work things out while I sleep, then clearly: it’s an awesome book. 

I so don’t want to spoil anything either, especially given that the movie just came out, so I’m going to try really, really hard not to.  Spoiler Alerts will be posted if I just can’t help myself. 

No one reading this should expect this book to be stupid, but I was blown away by just how smart it actually is. 

No, scratch that: this book is fucking brilliant. 

There’s no question that there’s just a disgusting amount of math, but it’s all pretty accurate.  I admit, after about 50 pages, I gave up doing the equations myself and just trusted that Watney was right, but I suspect that if someone was in fact stranded on Mars with identical supplies and a copy of this book, they might be able to survive. 

Part of this is also a challenge for readers.  I found myself trying to think of what he could use next, what would then make it possible for him to pull off whatever insane trick he was about to try.  There’s no way, of course, that I could have figured out that he was going to try to use spare rocket fuel to make water. I just don’t have the technical education to even know what, exactly, is in rocket fuel (big surprise, English teacher and all).  But occasionally, I could get an idea about it, and once – when something goes wrong and he needs to find something flammable, fast – I actually got the solution about 2 sentences before Watney said it!

I was so proud of myself.  Like, so proud I did a little happy dance in my living room. 

The character development of Mark Watney himself syncs beautifully with the intelligence displayed by the novel.  Weir has crafted Watney into a likeable character full of dark humor and searing brainpower, and every time something goes wrong (which is all the time), I wanted to fall over and cry until Watney himself cheered me up as his own expense. 

After the first maybe six pages, which he spends bitching endlessly about his predicament, Watney turns into a surprisingly optimistic character.  For a while, I was suspicious of this: How could it possibly be realistic that this guy just didn’t give up and say “Hm… trapped on Mars with almost no chance of survival? Fuck it!” 

There is of course that typical “survival of the human spirit” thing that I could cite here.  I’m not going to do that, perhaps because I’m too pessimistic to buy into it.  Watney is, at times, pessimistic as well, but his personality buoys him in those moments with sarcastic and wonderful humor that could crack even the darkest moods. 

Like this, for example:

I swear, I will update this right side up just as soon as I figure out how to fix it. It's right side up on MY computer screen :) 

Weir actually discusses that potentially unrealistic personality in his book.  When NASA figures out that Watney is indeed still alive on Mars, the directors talk about whether or not he has the mental fortitude to survive, and Kapoor says that he was in fact chosen as an astronaut due to his personality.  His humor, his adaptability, and his intelligence all combined to create an astronaut who would get along with everyone without creating conflict in the group.  And this makes sense; why would NASA want to send up an astronaut who’s an asshole?  These people are trapped in small, tight spaces for months, and required by their jobs to rely on each other for every bit of their survival.  They have to be relatively pleasant, or everything is going to fail. 

I may be biased, but I think his personality makes perfect sense.  And boy, did I enjoy his Martian-antics.  

What I found perhaps more unrealistic than Watney's character was the global effort to bring him home.  Watney spends about two paragraphs close to the end of the book pondering this very effort:  Would people, in fact, unite to try to bring a stranded astronaut home?  After all, the theoretical cost must be in the hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of dollars -- few countries just have that kind of money lying around waiting to be spent on one man.  

But, as Watney points out, people want to help, no matter the cost, and they are willing to selfless things to do so.  They line up to donate blood after accidents, donate money from around the world after natural disasters, travel long distances to devote time to helping others in need.  

Could it be true? Would the world join together to bring one astronaut home?

Honestly: I’m not sure.  Maybe? It’s a disgusting amount of money (part of the never-ending stream of math! Hooray math! *sarcasm*), but the drive to help others is strong.  The urge to rescue people is strong, and the idea of someone being actually stranded on a foreign planet… it would be such a strange, new, and truly horrific situation that I bet the money would be found, somewhere, to make a rescue happen. 

Perhaps the world is brighter than I want to see sometimes.  

(FYI: I feel like this isn’t a spoiler – all you have to do is watch the movie trailer, and poof! You know they’re attempting a rescue.  That’s all I’ll say though.)

I also just finished The Martian Chronicles about two weeks before I read this book, which was an interesting juxtaposition to The Martian. 

The Martian Chronicles is old-school, Asimov-style science fiction.  It’s interesting, yes, but like a lot of classic sci-fi, it’s rather dry.  Bradbury spends a lot of time world building and less on character itself, whereas Weir has delved deep into the human psyche when thrown into this situation and the futile nature of the man vs. nature conflict. 

In that way, The Martian is part of the new generation of sci-fi writing.  I realize it’s not actually a new generation, but I don’t read a lot of sci-fi so I’m not altogether sure what this genre has looked like, writing-wise in the last ten years.  However, my husband reads and writes a lot of sci-fi, and he informs me that it’s a relatively neglected genre.  There are lots of publications, sure, but not a lot of attention.  The fact that The Martian is one of the most popular novels of the last few years is a big deal for the genre.    

I’m not always up to date on current popular books, so I was kind of excited to finish this just in time for the movie.  My students know I read it – it’s been on my “Currently Reading” sign for a few weeks, even though I really just dove into the meat of it in the last few days – and they’ve asked me about it.

Frankly, it’s hard to recommend simply because it’s so filled with language.  Seriously.  The opening line says “fuck” after all (check out my first line – see what I did there?? *self-five*), and there are potential ramifications if parents ask who recommended such a ‘vulgar’ book to their children.  Much as I love it, I don’t want to get in trouble.  (Although, truly, it’s not inappropriate other than the occasional curse, so I’d be okay recommending it to my seniors. J) 

Curses aside, I desperately wish I could have kids read it.  The Martian might be the most perfect example of man vs. nature since Moby Dick, and lord knows I’m not teaching that (17 pages about sunrises? No thank you!).  Examples of that kind of book are just so few and far between, and often they require a lot of back explaining to make sense to my students.  I could talk about Into Thin Air, for example, but I would have to explain the whole plot.  The Martian, being thus introduced into pop culture as a movie, is much more accessible.  I can reference it and they’ll understand, and that’s really what I need. 

But it would be really cool to teach.

One last thing: I was looking for illustrative pictures and stumbled upon basically the coolest website ever: All the real-Mars pictures of the sites from the book. 

http://www.uahirise.org/martian/

Here’s the thing: there’s a detailed series of maps at the beginning of the book, but it’s still hard to really picture it all since it is, after all, set on Mars.  Plus, I forgot the maps were there before long – the rush of reading and the tension of the book meant that the maps got totally abandoned. 

And really, this is the resource I WISH I’d had while I was actually reading.  The real NASA pictures of all the places Weir is describing, the areas where Watney lives and travels over, are far more impressive than any black and white line map could ever be. 

This site also has some articles linked to it, and those are good reads as well.  There are some minor examples in landscape; for example, apparently the Acidalia Planitia, where the Ares III (and later, Watney) is located, is actually much more rocky and rugged than Weir describes.  But honestly, if those are all the mistakes of this book are, then who cares?  It doesn’t diminish the story at all, so I’m not worried about it. 

It’s far cooler to open up the pictures and see Mars, regardless of if the rocks are in the right places. 

Ok, I swear I’m almost done. 

I’m also super excited to go see the movie.  I purposefully put off seeing it opening weekend because I hadn’t finished the book yet, but I’ve heard stellar reviews thus far. 

Because I’m that guy, I know it can’t quite live up to the book, and there are some misleading moments in the trailer that make me a little nervous about seeing it.  For example:  The trailer has a moment where he’s narrating about his family and it shows a mom and a kid.  Nope. He’s single – he actually talks about ¾ way through the book that he’s hoping this whole “survived on Mars” thing will help him get laid, which is hilarious.

Or that moment where Matt Damon goes “surprise!” and the whole of Mission Control cheers? Also nope. 

Even so… I’m not sure I care.  The book was so good! I can’t pass up the chance to see that on the big screen, not when it’s Ridley Scott directing and Matt Damon as Watney. 

I can always count on xkcd to be smart and hilarious. 

My personal assessment is this: the movie is either going to be high-tension with a fabulous dark humor side, or it’s just going to be two hours of watching Matt Damon do math. 

Either way, frankly, I’m in. 

(Hey! I think I got all the way through this without any spoilers! Hooray! As a celebration, I’m going to see The Martian J)