A Martian's Chronicles

Over the past few months, I'd been hearing a lot of buzz about a novel titled The Martian. The story behind the story was talked about as much as the novel itself. Author Andy Weir had originally self-published it on his own web site in 2001, chapter by chapter. His handful of readers, wanting it all to be collected in one place, convinced him to offer it through Amazon. Weir did, charging the minimum allowable 99 cents. In a flash, the thing had blown up, topping bestseller lists and securing him not only an agent and a publisher, but a movie deal.

The Martian is a sci-fi novel set in the near future, chronicling the third manned mission to Mars. Specifically it centers on one astronaut, Mark Watney, who during a freak accident is mistakenly presumed dead and left marooned alone on the planet. He has limited supplies and no communication with Earth. He has only his own sarcastic wit and repair skills to figure out a way to survive.

This is a real page turner of a book, pulling you through at a breakneck pace out of breathless desire to see what happens next. One calamity after another befalls the main character, each seemingly more dire and unsolvable than the last, and you've just gotta know how he's going to overcome. His gallows humor, coupled with a first person narrative, makes you root for him too. And on top of all that, Andy Weir claims to have grounded the scenarios he's written in plausible science; if he hasn't, he writes in a way that convinces you he has.

But that said, Weir does make some mistakes too -- probably because he's a first time author who originally wrote this without an editor to help him shore things up. Though the novel does have other characters (NASA employees back on Earth, the other astronauts on the Mars mission), none of them pop like the central figure of Mark Watney. I'm not sure there's a solid physical description of anyone in the entire novel, and all the non-Watneys have a homogenized, interchangeable behavior and dialogue pattern -- something that feels like "Watney Lite."

There's also one narrative style too many. The first person material, Watney making his log entries, is Weir's strongest writing. A more traditional third person style comes in when the book tracks all the other characters, and that works well enough too. But there are a few scattered pages where Weir wants to follow events on Mars without being in Watney's head. Here, he uses the style of a weird omniscient documentary maker who fancies himself a poet. It disrupts the rest of the book's tension and immediacy, and feels odd and out of place.

Still, Weir's few missteps don't bring the book crashing down. It's a very fun, exciting, and quick read. There's a reason Hollywood came calling, and I'm certainly interested to see what kind of movie results. (We know this much already: it's a movie directed by Ridley Scott, starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristen Wiig, Jeff Daniels, Kate Mara, Sean Bean, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and more.) Until that movie arrives, I'd certainly recommend reading the book. I give it a B+.