My trouble with martians...

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As a lot of us are aware by now: Mark Watney is the 17th person to set foot on Mars and the first to be stranded on it. After his crew mistakenly leaves him for dead while evacuating during a dust storm, Mark has to figure out how to survive as the only human on the planet - or become the first one to die there.

And there's a lot to figure out: food, water, communication, transport. Much of the book is spent describing how Mark (almost typed "Mars") and NASA attempt to solve these problems - in detail. Andy Weir clearly did a lot of work to come up with plausible solutions. At times the book is reminiscent of the Methods section of a real scientific paper, which is something that people often skip because it's tedious - so it's to Weir's credit that he's written pretty readable descriptions that don't slow down the story. It makes me wonder if science textbooks in the form of adventure stories could someday be a thing. Novel-length word problems.

I liked watching the conflict between scientists and administrators - the hilariousness and frustration of which I'm sure many scientists can relate to. But my absolute favorite parts of the book were the cameos of previous, real-life Mars missions. It brought back the excitement of watching those missions unfold. Space rovers always seem like the most heroic of inanimate objects.

Unfortunately, the emotional connection evoked by spacecraft didn't extend to the human characters, who at best seem like two-dimensional tropes (the Aspergers one, the hot nerd, etc.) and at worst just blur into each other. Mark is somewhat funny, but not that funny, and woodenly impervious to most physical and mental consequences of prolonged isolation and malnutrition. The style of writing is unremarkable, although I guess Weir gets away with it by framing it as the no-frills log of a desperate astronaut. The logs are mixed in with passages of various side characters' POVs, an ominous omniscient narrator, TV transcripts, and the like.

But y'know, different authors try to accomplish different things, and once I accepted that Weir wasn't aiming for beauty or complexity, I was able to sit back and enjoy the slapstick space shenanigans. However, one thing that I couldn't get past was the questionable way that it presents women in science. Even if we put aside some of Mark's comments because they're just part of his oh-so-irreverent personality (umm), the problem remains that the geekiness of the book is only of the smug, socially unaware, male-gaze variety (like The Big Bang Theory on a larger scale).

Commander Lewis is a woman who's capable and respected, and that's awesome. But she's the exception rather than the norm. Let's say you're a woman who wants to work in science but you don't have, or don't want, Lewis's military background. What other possibilities are presented to you in the world of The Martian? You can take on a helper role, like Annie's, where understanding science is secondary to being glamorous. Or you can be knowledgable and quick-thinking like Johanssen, as long as attractiveness is still your main claim to fame. Or you can be like Mindy: You may get credit for being observant and hard-working, but you still face people (mostly men) who judge you by your appearance, who are polite because they worry about your delicate feelings rather than because you deserve respect, and who readily pull rank and demote you as they please. These small details of characterization seem insignificant next to Watney's struggle and NASA's efforts to save him. But with every throwaway gesture that suggests female scientists don't warrant the same respect as their male counterparts, the book quietly works against the ideals of Teamwork and Progress that it outwardly glorifies.

View all my reviews