While the science-heavy material doesn’t make for the most engaging read (the stuff at NASA and on the Hermes with a bunch of characters interacting works much better), you can tell that Weir has a deep love of the scientific brilliance that a Mars mission requires and the ingenuity of engineers in particular. On the one hand, I appreciate Weir’s devotion to scientific accuracy, but word problems aren’t compelling literature, and I sense that Weir knows it since he slathers on so much humor from Watney (thankfully, the jokes work). There are long stretches where it comes off like a word problem with Watney trying to explain how he’s going to get enough water or hydrogen or complete whatever calculations are necessary to keep surviving. Reading The Martian can be a bit of a chore at times.

The “why” is what drives Weir, but not the movie. For Scott and Goddard, what’s important is that the airlock blows and the probe fails, and that Watney and NASA have to deal with the fallout. I suppose Scott could have kept doing ultra close-up takes of the airlock seam starting to rip or gone inside the probe to show how the cubes became gelatinous and threw off the trajectory, but that would make a long film even longer and take us away from character scenes. They’re the best part of the book, and yet I can understand why Goddard stripped them out because they’re not necessarily cinematic. It’s how everyone is at fault, and no one is at fault, and why contingency plans are so important. In each one, Weir slowly weaves the narrative of how a minor detail grew and grew without anyone noticing, and when the issue finally reached the point of being mission critical, it was too late. Two of the most memorable sequences in the book are the airlock blowing out and the food probe exploding. Weir, for his part, wants to show that even the best and the brightest can’t plan for the little things that can be catastrophic to a mission. It may have an affinity for science, but it wants to keep its focus on intense character interactions and Watney’s survival. Ridley Scott’s The Martian is about bold, sci-fi adventure.

The martian paperback