The Martian

Read this one in two sittings, which for me is unusual. Most seasons I ration a book out over a couple weeks because there’s no library up here and the next supply drop is the next supply drop. This one I finished a day early and had nothing to read for four days and regretted the whole decision, which I think is a compliment to the book.

Watney is a botanist and mechanical engineer stranded on Mars when his crew evacuates during a storm, believing him dead, and the entire book is him keeping himself alive with what’s already sitting in the habitat until the next mission can maybe reach him, years off. Weir wrote this originally posting chapters online for people who’d check his math, and it shows in the best way. Every fix is worked out on the page: how many calories a potato farm in Martian soil fertilized with his own waste can produce, how to make water by burning rocket fuel, how to patch a blown-out airlock with tape and a resin. I found myself doing the arithmetic along with him, which is not something I do with most novels.

What I liked best is that the book never confuses competence with invincibility. Watney’s plans mostly work, and then something specific and stupid breaks them, a hexadecimal decoding error, a dust storm, a rover flip, and he has to build the next fix out of the wreckage of the last one. That’s closer to how actual problems solve than most survival stories admit. Nothing here is romantic about being alone with a problem. It’s just methodical, one variable at a time, which happens to be exactly the mode I’m in on a slow smoke-check morning working out whether that haze on the ridge is dust or something worth calling in.

The voice is the one thing I’d push back on if I were grading strictly. Watney narrates through log entries and he’s funny in almost exactly the same register the whole way through, disaster after disaster met with the same wisecrack cadence. It works because the problem-solving carries the tension regardless, but four hundred pages of a single joke rhythm is a lot, even a good joke rhythm. The chapters from Houston and the crew, when they cut away from him, are weaker and mostly there for pacing.

Even with that, this is the best pure problem-solving book I’ve read up here, and I’ve had a lot of time to compare candidates. Gave it to a hiker passing through in August. Hope he had the sense to read it slow.