Book Review: Andy Weir's The Martian

“Mankind flung its advance agents ever outward, ever outward. Eventually it flung them out into space, into the colorless, tasteless, weightless sea of outwardness without end.

It flung them like stones.”

― Kurt Vonnegut

As a teenager, my brother got me hooked on reading Kurt Vonnegut. Novels like Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World fixed themselves on my list of favorites. Yet, over the years I somehow forgot all about science fiction. Then I picked up Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, and I remembered what it’s like to fall into that kind of world: our own, but unrecognizable.

When Mark Whatney, an astronaut for NASA on a mission to Mars, arrives at his destination, a dust storm flings him away from his crew. They assume him to be dead and abort the mission, leaving the planet immediately. Mark wakes up, low on oxygen and alone on the orange planet. From there we follow Mark’s survival through daily journal entries. He details with perfect wit and character his ingenuity in troubleshooting the life-threatening reality of life on Mars.

Even in the face of overwhelming odds, Mark is meticulous, funny, and hopeful. Through careful research, Weir created a believable character in Mark Whatney. His positive personality and solid technical details carry the first half of the book smoothly along, even through unrelenting life-threatening situations.

Months pass. Just as this single-character narrative begins to feel cyclical and hopeless, we meet characters on Earth who learn Mark was left behind alive. When this news reaches his still-traveling crew who left him there, they are devastated. The plot moves from focusing only on Mark’s journal entries to covering multiple side-plots and characters, and Weir continues to expertly write through this shift. In the second half of the novel, a worldly humanity that didn’t exist in the first comes to light. With added relationships on Earth, even more is at stake for the reader. Throughout the novel, Weir gives us a startlingly riveting narrative until the very end.

I have been promoting The Martian by Andy Weir for months now. The book has become one of the best selling at the bookstore where I work. Readers who enjoy it should check out Weir’s short story, The Egg, available to read online. This first-time novelist originally had difficulty getting the book published, so put chapters on his blog one by one for free. Over time, Weir established it as an Amazon Kindle book, then an audiobook, then finally it was picked up by Crown, a major publisher. Eventually, Weir’s debut novel made it onto the New York Times Bestseller list in the 12th position.

While The Martian is a fantastic science fiction novel, it steers clear of the existential questions the books I mentioned earlier focus on. This isn’t to say the book lacks substance, however it may be more accessible for a summer read than, say, 1984. But if, after falling in love with this story, you want something similar that might challenge your view of this world further, I recommend picking up Kurt Vonnegut’s classic, The Sirens of Titan.

Tess Fahlgren is a native Glaswegian (MT). She is currently teaching Art and Creative Writing at Nashua High School.