Book Review: The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir is the fictional story of Mark Watney who is accidentally abandoned on Mars. Space exploration and engineering principles are used in clever ways to build a non-stop thrilling plot, but sadly character development was trivial. Overall a very enjoyable science fiction read. This review has no spoilers.

Who should read this book?

Anyone who enjoys tales about realistic space exploration with a focus on engineering. The science talk is sometimes detailed, but generally the language is easy and accessible.

The Good

The equipment, catastrophes, plans, calculations, and flight trajectories all seemed to make sense scientifically. Given the ambitious content, this is actually a huge achievement for the author. So bravo!

The protagonist Mark Watney comes up with a lot of clever survival ideas and his inventive use of all his resources was really interesting. The language was playful, funny, and easy to read. Finally, the book does a good job switching between mission logs, personal logs, text chat, and traditional novel prose.

The Bad

Oddly, Mark Watney would say things like "according to my boring math". I understand the author is trying to connect with a wider audience, but this was unbelievable to me. We have a world class astronaut and mechanical engineer saying math is boring. The head of public relations at NASA also showed disdain for the "nerds" and "geeks". Again, unbelievable. It felt like the dumb and stereotyped opinions of the masses were sneaking into the wrong characters.

Unfortunately, there was little mention of the training and personal history of any characters. The motivations, fears, and personal desires of characters were also never explored or explained. And every single character essentially performed their roles ideally. Aside from internal NASA affairs, events on Earth were rarely described, and when they were it was extremely vague. This felt like a huge missed opportunity to me. To enjoy the book more, often I had to imagine by myself what NASA and Earth would be thinking as certain events in the book occur.

When a good book ends usually you are a little (or a lot) sad that the characters you've grown to love have ended with that last page of the book. Not so with "The Martian". I put down the book and thought "well that was neat".

Summary

This book is a great science adventure novel about exploring the frontier. Although there is little character development, the writing is witty as Mark Watney turns out to be quite the comedian. You won't walk away from the book feeling inspired, but it is a thrilling read.