I’ve been dabbling at a The Martian book review for while now only to realize halfway through that it shouldn’t have been a review to begin with. It should be an essay about how the author, Andy Weir, made me love a book that, based on the premise, really shouldn’t have been my thing.
I really did not expect that I would like this book half as much as I did. It’s hard SF, which is probably my least favorite science fiction/fantasy genre. It has elements of golden age SF adventure fiction which I’m not particularly fond of either. It consists mostly of the protagonist monologuing to himself/the reader. The plot is very straight forward with no unforeseen twists which also meant there weren’t any hooks to speak of to keep me turning the pages. In summary, it’s not what I usually prefer in story.
Still, I decided to see what all the fuss was about and give it a chance. I practically ended up devouring the book.
It took me a while to realize why this book worked so much better for me than it should (a couple of months and three failed attempts at a review of the book, to be precise), but I think I finally got there.
Andy Weir seems to embrace the potential “flaws/weak points” of his premise (I know, I know, stuff like genre isn’t a flaw, but in the context of this essay, take the word to mean: Stuff that would normally force me to give up on a book). He takes the elements which some readers may like or at least not dislike but would chase away so many other readers and embraces them. He makes sure he either has a workaround inplace or takes these “flaws” and writes them in a way that makes them part of the appeal of the story, part of what makes it unique.
The genre of hard SF, for example, tends to include a fair deal of technobabble, explanations of the scientific elements of the story (stories by engineers written for engineers). Fans of the genre often enjoy this element of the stories, but for other readers it can easily come across as a flaw in the writing, the plot stopping dead in its tracks because the author wants to info dump pointless information about the cool technology they invented for their story.
Weir could have done just that and created a run-of-the-mill hard SF story that probably would have hit home with fans of the genre but not a wider audience. But in The Martian, he didn’t settle for mediocre.
The science of the story is extremely well researched, making it easier to suspend disbelief (to be fair, that’s a hallmark of all decent hard SF stories), but Weir also does a great job of explaining the science in layman terms, making it understandable to people like me. But that’s mitigating the negative effects of technobabble. Weir does more than that. He makes it a strong point of the story, even for the casual readers who might runaway from any other hard SF story out there.
Firstly, all the explanations of the science are directly tied to the main conflict, the protagonist’s attempt to get off Mars. None of it is there just to showcase the technology. Secondly, Weir uses the narrative voice to make the technobabble interesting. The main character’s sarcastic explanations often make part of the technology that keeps him alive part of a joke, which makes learning about the technology entertaining it itself.
The MC’s sarcastic way of explaning and interacting with the technology also ties into another element that could easily have been a drawback of the story, the lack of character interaction.
Reader preferences vary, of course, but I’d argue that most tend to prefer som mix of action, dialogue, and introspection. While The Martin does have all of these, the MC spends most of the book very isolated on Mars, leading to very little dialogue and character interaction. Instead of just ignoring this problem, Weir took the one thing the MC did interact with, his habitat on Mars, and made it feel like character interaction.
It’s not that Mars and the technology is “made into a character” as some put it, but the MC of the book speaks of the habitat and his rover as if they were people, and every failure is mentioned as if the technology is out to get him, humazing the technology. The result is that the book doesn’t feel like it’s lacking in dialogue and character interaction at all. The MC’s monologue takes the place of dialogue.
Even the lack of plot twists and hooks in the story is something Weir manages to work with. He keeps the novel short and doesn’t add a lot of fluff in between the plot points, keeping the pace high. This means that it’s only really towards the end that the plot feels a bit monotone and too straight forward.
The Martian might have a great narrative voice and overall solid prose, but in my opinion, it’s the structural choices Weir made, adressing every potential weak point in the basic premise, that turned it into such a great story. The Martian really shows that genre preferences do not matter all that much if a story is crafted well enough.
I have no idea how much of this was intetional, but when thinking about The Martian, I can’t help but feel that Andy Weir must have sat down and looked at his premise and said, “Right. These are the inherent weak points of my setup. What can I do to turn them into strong points instead or, failing that, work around them or mitigate them?”
The result was a book that went well beyond its genre audience. It wasn’t the perfect book (if such a thing exists), but it was, I believe, the very best a book with that particular premise could be.
Toby Backman 