The Martian by Andy Weir

A while back I asked for recommendations for science fiction reading involving botany. On our Facebook page Claire Soulsby suggested The Martian by Andy Weir. I’ve had a stroke of luck* and have been stuck in bed feeling sorry for myself. This has given me plenty of time to read it.

The story begins after a freak dust storm on Mars causes the Ares 3 team to abandon their mission, leaving behind their dead crew member, Mark Watney. Watney awakes to find himself alone with the habitat and no hope of rescue for years, and enough food for months. The challenge is to produce food, water and oxygen to keep him alive and then to establish contact with NASA to coördinate a rescue.

The key to survival is first botany. It’s Watney’s ability to grow food on Mars that keeps him alive long enough to get a fighting chance. As everybody knows Botanists are pretty much the closest thing we have to superhero geniuses, so Watney is able to engineer all the fixes he needs to make in the hab to make farming, and everything else he needs, happen.

The book reads like hard-SF for the most part. The science is plausible and by relying on near-future science it means that Weir puts his character in a believable danger. The start of the writing process was planning a hypothetical Mars mission, including contingency plans for what might go wrong. Then he realised the contingency plans would make the basis of a story.

Most of the story is told through log entries. This works to explain the problems and the solutions. It also gives a plausible reason for why the character comes across the way he does. I vaguely remember someone saying there are no characters in Shakespeare plays, just plot devices. In a similar way, I’m not sure there are many characters in this book. In a couple of other reviews, people think the characterisation is weak. Watney does things, but he’s not changed much by them. When the next problem comes along in the book, he simply settles down to solve it so while there are many problems, I don’t know if there are many setbacks or catastrophes. Watney’s job at times seems to be to set up the next problem.

Fortunately, the problems are interesting enough to pull the story along. It’s also a change to read something where not every scientific problem can be solved by basic physics.

There’s a video of a talk he gave at, including a reading of the first chapter.