Back in 2010, I published a story which began with a single-word paragraph: FUCK. ‘Mere Symptoms of Living’ is about a man trapped in a toilet at the outbreak of the zombie apocalypse. He finds a pen in his suit pocket and scribbles an account of his struggle for survival on the wall.
For many drafts, the story did not start that way. But when I came back after a long period, I decided it needed to make a bigger first impression, something that would catch the reader’s eye and make him or her read on. To me, ‘FUCK’ (especially in capital letters) captures in a word the modern person’s mindset when everything goes wrong, when the predictable course of events takes a sharp turn into an abyss.
So it’s no wonder the first line of The Martian – I’m fucked. – appealed to me. Had I known it was hard science fiction, I might never have begun reading it. But I did begin, and it got me in sufficiently that I had to keep going, even when the descriptions of engineering, physics and chemistry were laid on with a trowel.
The premise (as the best ones are) is simple: an astronaut presumed dead after an accident on a manned mission to the surface of Mars is alive – and needs to find ways to stay alive until NASA sends along its next mission.
Author Andy Weir does a fine job developing the character of Mark ‘The Martian’ Watney through the unlikely form of computer log updates. Watney is whipcrack smart and a loose cannon – two traits that stand him in good stead in his predicament – and he also delivers one-liners in the face of adversity that are appropriate, amusing and, on occasion, even unexpected. But he also has a small streak of humanity and self-doubt that ensures he doesn’t become a caricature.
It’s when the perspective shifts back to the NASA staff on earth, and the author adopts a more traditional narrative form, that things turn pungent.
Weir has a tin ear for dialogue, but then so do many hard SF authors; so let’s be generous and say it comes with the territory. But nothing can excuse the characters, which are drawn in broad, cartoonish strokes. The females are especially bad: NASA’s head of PR, Anna, says ‘fuck’ a lot and is rude to everyone, while Mindy, a low-ranking employee who discovers that Watney is alive on Mars, commences every sentence with ‘Uh…’ to show how unsure of herself she is. Two completely different characters ‘pinch their chins’ while pondering a knotty problem. Nearly all the characters are sarcastic. A couple are even ethnic stereotypes, something that normally doesn’t bother me. Weir first had to self-publish The Martian before it was picked up by a publisher, and on the strength of his characters and dialogue, I can see why editors turned up their noses at his manuscript.
But less-than-stellar characterisation and sometimes clumsy prose cannot greatly detract from The Martian as a whole. A likeable main character in a compelling quandary has powered along
much worse books than this one.