The Martian

The Martian is a fine idea. It is a pretty massive failure of a literary work though. The only good part is the science–and even that gets dry after a while.

This is another book that did not live up to its potential. Here we have a man alone on a planet, but the only time he openly acknowledges this is in passing compared to how much talk of water reclaimers there is in the book. Mark doesn't have any more depth than the paper his journals have been printed on–unfortunately that is the case with every other character as well.

The overarching themes are supposed to be resilience and humans-looking-out-for-each-other and hope. Weir literally spells it out on the last page, opting to flood the preceding pages with tiring jokes and nary a hint of artful prose. He misses a lot, and opened up about his weak writing online when the book became decently popular.

The Martian was an opportunity for Weir to explore the loneliness and despair vs. hope in Mark. He could have put Mark in some real danger, threaded tension into the work. Instead, everything goes jolly well(pretty much) and the man has ONE episode of slight hopelessness. None of the other characters really matter and could have been robots. All that being said, the science did keep me reading earnestly for some time, it was just impossible to keep up. The more I read, the more I realized it was going to stay 99% shallow and repetitive throughout the whole book.

To be fair to Weir, he did self-publish this and probably didn't expect to be scrutinized. Better luck next time.