Andy Weir, Author of the Martian, Shares Details About His Next Novel | Hacker News Reader

Andy Weir, Author of the Martian, Shares Details About His Next Novel

smithsonianmag.com

53 pointsapress28 comments

Am I the only one who thought the writing wasn't particularly good? Disclaimer: I still haven't seen the movie.

It kind of felt like a throwback to 1950s science fiction where characterization was more of an afterthought than a fully-fleshed out endeavor. I.e. the "I am an idea / political position / plot device wearing a human-suit" school of character design. Except with more pop culture and cool added in this case.

Which isn't to say it wasn't an entertaining book and I didn't heartily appreciate the story!

I think it's pretty well acknowledged that he's not a terribly good writer. But he's a darn good storyteller, as it is entertaining and gripping from start to finish.

Yeah, I felt the same way but the plot and the problems were so well done I didn't mind too much. He was a programmer before becoming a writer and so his style seemed like he was just iteratively solving cool problems to me.

The movie does a great job with the characters though. One of the best films I've seen in a while!

I thought the framing device did a good job of covering for the thin characterization. We were getting his broadcasts to historians on the chance that he didn't survive. There were several places in the book where it cuts out for a few hours or days after a major setback, presumably while he goes through the cycles of grief before deciding to press forward.

The movie was pretty good, the only thing I really missed from it was the infamous drill scene. That was a real emotional kick in the book, but I understand why they killed it for the movie (trying to keep the NASA folks from becoming a total sideshow in the third act).

Yeah, I really missed the drill bit, too. I begrudgingly accepted it made some sense.

No, you are not. I thought the same thing: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/10/book-review-the-martian/

You are not wrong about the writing, which was weak during the parts of the novel that concerned groups of people on Earth or the rest of the crew in space interacting. They all talked with one voice and seemed like stock characters instead of real people to me.

However, the parts with Watley keeping his log on Mars seemed very true to me. Not the fictional occurrences but the tone and style seemed consistent with old-time sailors logs or autobiographies of people caught up in historical disasters.

Interestingly, I attended a book club that discussed this novel, split about 50/50 between engineers and non-engineers. All the engineers agreed that the Watley parts were great and the rest was not so good, but the non-engineers almost uniformly had the exact opposite opinion!

(The film is good)

To be fair, it's probably more reasonable to judge it in the stream of epistolary / didactic literature than purely narrative. I remember Defoe's Crusoe and Stoker's Dracula not having particularly inspiring characters by modern standards either.

It is curious about the divergence between engineers and non-engineers. If he ever writes another novel in the same vein, it'd be interesting to collaborate with another author and have a richly-characterized political story on Earth contrasted by a more "engineerly-characterized" space story.

(Keep meaning to watch film, have not gotten to)

>(The film is good)

Ridley Scott could make a good movie out of even the lousiest book.

I thought the same thing. I saw the movie first, and then decided to read the book because a friend said it was a lot better. I didn't finish the book.

I thought Watney's logs were well written. He felt like a real character to me. Everyone else, not so much.

If you enjoyed 'The Martian', you should read his famous story 'The Egg', if you haven't already:

http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

I like to think that short story was inspired by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

I make a point of re-reading this story every several months to a year-ish. It reminds me to look at and engage with the world in a more compassionate way, and I like that.

Oh wow, I didn't realize that he also did "The Egg". I also recommend reading this!

Glad to hear that he's doing another "scientifically accurate". For a while, he was saying that the next book would be a 'typical' space-opera style novel without that aspect, and while I do enjoy that genre, I didn't feel like the writing quality of The Martian would be good enough to carry a space opera.

He's found a niche, something that he is good at, and I'm really glad to see him sticking to this rather than trying to do something that I doubt his ability to pull off.

The Martian isn't scientifically accurate, though it's closer than a lot of other stuff. The entire plot device of the storm at the beginning, needed to give a reason for Watney to be abandoned on Mars, was total hogwash: Mars doesn't have an atmosphere thick enough for that. Some other things were questionable too, like the rescue at the end.

Personally, I'd like to see some more movies that really are scientifically accurate, about things in space near the Earth, perhaps one set on the Moon showing a colony there used for asteroid mining and ore refining.

I find it kind of sad that he has to take crap just because his lead is a female character. How is this in any way remarkable?

If he announced he's writing a feminist novel or something that specifically addresses gender issues that might have been an interesting line of questioning.

Where do you see that he's getting crap for a female lead?

They might mean just getting the question "why write a female lead".

Why is that "getting crap" though? It's a legitimate question to ask with many possible interesting answers. His answer was actually quite good, no real reason other than it felt right for the character.

The flip side is though if he was writing about a man no on would ask the question, which is the issue.

Choosing a male protagonist is default, choosing to write about a women though is strange and needs to be questioned.

On the flip side of that, would anybody get upset if an author was asked "why a male character"? What if the author was female?

The whole thinking behind that kind of complaint within the context of the question with no reason is stupid. I don't see the interviewer "questioning" the author of the choice of a female lead. People are just making too much out of innocent questions that may have interesting answers.

> Choosing a male protagonist is default

Choosing a protagonist whose gender (and race, etc.) is the same as the author's is the default. I don't think anyone asks Margaret Atwood why she chooses a female protagonist.

But they also don't ask why she chose a male protagonist.

Margaret Atwood may not be the best example because she so rarely chooses male protagonists, but the gender of the author and how it relates to their characters (and readers) comes up all the time.

It is, for example, why Rowling published Harry Potter as "JK" and not "Joanne"—she didn't want her own gender to affect how readers perceived her book. A large number of female authors have done this over the years.

There does seem to be some asymmetry where male authors struggle to write female characters well and are questioned about it more. I'm not sure where the imbalance comes from.

I don't think that's true, although that's gut feeling and not based on data. Do you have any data on that?

> It's a legitimate question

Maybe in the 1950s or something.

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