A martian’s review of The Martian (2015) | Hacker News Reader

A martian’s review of The Martian (2015)

ryanbanderson.com

69 pointsTomte50 comments

I disagree with the complaint about Mark Whatney's lack of character depth. It's true that there's little character depth, but I don't think that's why Andy Weir choose not to do the deep, solemn scenes. There's moments where it's clear he's chosen not just to avoid those, but to intentionally choose the opposite (like the scene where someone on Earth wonders what he could be thinking, trapped alone on a planet, and then it switches to Whatney's viewpoint and we learn he is pondering Aquaman's abilities or something). Andy Weir didn't do that because it's been done a lot before. The book is deliberately not Castaway or any number of other solemn stories about isolated men contemplating human existence. It's fresh and new and was new precisely because it didn't do all that other, well-trodden introspective stuff. Starry Night doesn't have any character development - it's just not a requirement for all works to have.

Well, he did take a different tack on Project Hail Mary. No spoilers here other than the protagonist figures out the darkest, most reflective aspects as he goes along, which is a great counterpoint to the escalation in the story and evens things out a great deal.

I recently heard Project Hail Mary mentioned. I didn't know Andy Weir wrote a third book until that moment. It's a great novel on par with The Martian, and after the success of The Martian, I'm surprised I didn't hear about Project Hail Mary sooner.

I use an adblocker and don't watch TV comercials. Does anyone know if Project Hail Mary was advertised? I guess that's one downside of not seeing ads.

I learned about it via an ad on my Kindle lock screen. One of the only ads I can remember that led me to a purchase. Great book!

I wish I could somehow obscure your comment from everyone at Amazon.

I use an e-ink tablet, Android stock, due to eye strain. The kindle app is such a bloated pile of ad laden junk, it is barely usable.

Not only that, but it won't let me get rid of whitespacing around the text, and more, eating tonnes of real estate.

Meanwhile, every other app, eg moon reader, etc, is fast and slick.

Impressive, Amazon!

I buy what I can elsewhere, due to this, but sometimes have no choice... and I imagine losing a few sales is offset by more buy in due to the horrid ads?

Why do you have to use the kindle app? Because of books in azw format? If you use calibre you can convert it to other formats.

Newer kindle formats require all sorts of work, and constantly change. I also need to keep a window vm around, it is as annoying as the kindle app.

Thanks for the mention though, and I know calibre is quite convenient for some.

I run calibre on mint.. VM for the kindle app?

Yes, I've not seen docs pointing to any other way...

I usually get my list of "to read" from either; Goodreads (yes, I know... Amazon data capture) or John Scalzi's "Whatever" blog - but, I have never seen TV commercials for books, even before I went streaming platform only.

At the same time, you could tell that he deliberately didn't include those moments in The Martian because he's not comfortable writing from that standpoint. In Project Hail Mary, those moments seem shoehorned in and the voice turns back into being aloof and impassionate in the next sentence. Even the end of the book presented two options and he took the less emotional one.

I think the less emotional ending was pretty much a given. The whole book also hinted at that as it was a redemption for the character's earlier behaviour. Having him choose the other option would have been really dark especially because of the consequences for the 'other team' (obfuscated a bit because of the lack of spoiler tags here)

I'm also imagining that the bulk of his personality and self-identity are wrapped around science, engineering and space exploration. As much as he misses all the creature comforts of Earth, the actual challenges of surviving on Mars make him feel like a pig in slop. He's being asked to flex every mental muscle he's spent his lifetime building up, honed even sharped by fear of oblivion. If it were me, I'd probably have the same attitude.

The thing I think Weir missed is that as soon as he's embraced by his crew on their ship, I'd expect to him (and me) to absolutely break down in sobbing tears after a year of pent up tension.

Yeah Weir is clearly a geek like us. Preferring to write about the depth of technical challenges and using them to avoid facing the emotional darkness of the situation. To me this feels like very typical behaviour. I think it's showing a lot of genuine character depth from that point of view. People expect Watney to think like a normal person, not a geek.

In his second book, Artemis, Weir manages to build a somewhat more complex character...but with the exact same voice as Watney. It's disappointing.

I was watching a review of The Martian on YouTube a while ago. The reviewer was a young female, and her major complaint was that Mark Watney's character-voice just sounded like a middle-aged white American guy. I thought "well, he is ~ this isn't very valid criticism...". Perhaps not all readers identify with the main character, and that's a valid criticism, but I don't think it's a flaw of the writing itself. This same YouTuber had the same critique about Jasmine in Artemis. Yeah - that's fair criticism of the writing; Jasmine did sound like a middle-aged white American guy. If you can look past that, Artemis is still a fun, enjoyable read.

[Edit] Added sentence beginning with "Perhaps not all readers..." to clarify.

Actually the movie failed to portray Mark as the unwavering optimist he is in the books. And besides some impressive visuals, the movie is rather dull, while the book is very entertaining.

Agreed with this. In all three of Weirs books, the tone/atmosphere is almost continually lighthearted. You can interpret that as a lack of emotional depth, but for me it also shows Weirs laser like focus on stuff he is good at writing: resourceful application of "basic" but real science to solve problems.

I also found the balance of the book refreshing, and took the lack of "character development" as instead a sign of his intense focus on the problems at hand. It actually made it more plausible to me that he survived - sure, if he'd spent many sleepless martian nights agonizing and introspecting it could have made for more drama, but his optimism and ingenuity would have been less believable, and ultimately had he survived it would feel more fantastic than earned.

Weir himself has discussed the varying characterisations in the Martian, Artemis and PHM. In an interview at [0], he says:

Well, my previous two books, The Martian and Artemis (which are also available for sale!) feature characters whose personalities are based on aspects of my own real personality, Mark Watney [from The Martian] has a lot of my own personality traits and Jazz Bashara [from Artemis] who is a Saudi woman living on the moon, believe it or not, her personality is based on largely the way I was when I was her age.

I wanted to grow as a writer this time, so I made Rylan Grace’s personality not [be] based on my own. I created a new character out of whole cloth, not just using aspects of my own persona. So one thing I decided is that he’s conflict-averse and likes to stay in a safe environment (or something he considers safe) and being a middle school teacher is a safe environment. He doesn’t get a lot of adversity from the students. They look up to him because they’re not teenagers yet. He’s also a goody-two-shoes, so it makes sense that he would work with children.

In a separate interview (that I can't find now) Weir states that PHM was an attempt to write a character that evolves, unlike Watney, who in effect retains the same character (wise-cracking optimist) throughout the book.

[0] https://www.scifinow.co.uk/books/space-man-an-interview-with...

Interesting. In my school days I saw many classes that would definitely give a lot of adversity. It required tough leadership sometimes from the teachers.

By the way I thought Artemis was his best book by far. It wasn't all about science and the story wasn't as limited as there wasn't a single isolated individual. I thought it was a really good book and I hope he comes up with a sequel. I suppose as people now know him for The Martian they want more of the same and Project Hail Mary certainly fits the bill.

There is a bit more character development in new Weir’s book - Project Hail Mary, but it still is a great book. Not as great as The Martian, but solid second.

Interestingly, Andy Weir was on 'Imaginary Worlds' [0] the other day, and weighs in on this topic. I don't want to spoil you for it so I won't go in to it.

[0] https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/weir-science

“Why doesn’t he seem to be fazed by more than a year of absolute isolation?”

This line from the review reads much differently in 2021 than it would have in 2015.

Some people are just built that way. I imagine many people here on HN could cope with isolation pretty well (I know I can). I imagine that's something NASA would have screened for too in its Mars mission selection.

There's isolation and absolute isolation. Most people haven't gone full hermit and cut themselves off from the outside world. Between phones (calling, texting), chat apps (discord, slack), video chat (zoom, FaceTime, Google whateveritscalledthisweek) few people today experiences absolute isolation in the way the character does in the book (for a very extended period).

Physical isolation is one thing, and may be intolerable to many, but social isolation is another. Not even having another person to speak to, let alone text with, for weeks/months at a time is very different than what most people experienced through the various shutdowns and social distancing efforts.

True. I got it in my head to try to walk the Appalachian Trail after college (decided to wait until later in life). One of the things recommended to me in training was to camp in isolation for 4 or 5 days. By the last day, I was a little edgy and started imagining someone was in my campsite late at night. And that's with the safety net knowing I could just walk a couple miles out of the woods back to my car and civilization.

Did you end up doing it? I've found that thru-hiking is actually one of the most social endeavors one can undertake.

I did not. That social aspect makes sense. It’s a pretty popular endeavor, from what I’ve gathered. I remember reading a book on how to do it (recipes, packing, prep). I recall that book saying that many hikers do it before starting their careers or right after retirement. I recently moved somewhat closer, so it’s starting to get back in my thoughts. Maybe do it in chunks. It sounds like you might have done it. Any thoughts?

I did the PCT, not the AT, but if it's something you're interested in you absolutely should do it.

It's hard to find a time in your life that works but I quit my job and it was absolutely worth it.

Doing it in chunks is fine and works for some people but doing it all at once is a completely different experience unlike anything else.

Social isolation was great. No distractions

You're on a social media website. You were not socially isolated. That is the entire point of the parent's comment.

By that definition Mark was not socially isolated, since he had earth communication. He was even effectively live twitch streaming his life.

Are you really equivocating being on a planet with high latency and low bandwidth download and essentially zero upload to being inside with your family/pets/Slack/email/iDevice? You are again totally missing the point that you were not isolated from other people for a year.

Yep. I didn't talk to anyone for months. Was on solo backpacking trip. It was great.

Also the initial point was about total isolation, he was not totally isolated, he had better bandwidth and latency than 1800s mail.

The entire latter half of the book he is completely isolated and cannot receive communications from Earth. He could send messages via Morse code, but that was it.

Mark had no communication for some extended period at the start of the novel. And it wasn't even voluntary isolation (like you might have here on Earth assuming you're not in prison or stuck on a remote island) where he opts not to use the communication tools. He flat out didn't have access to it and was absolutely isolated in a way that 99.99999% of modern humans have not experienced.

Worth mentioning that, at a minimum, he is an astronaut specifically chosen and psychologically trained and prepared for a multi-year to mission to Mars. He shouldn't have normal human reactions and given that his situation never turns truly hopeless, he has been trained to keep working the mission as well as he can.

Also, though he is isolated, he knows everything he does and discovers will be eventually found, analyzed and made useful by NASA and future space travellers. All of this can provide a sense of greater social connection that can keep him motivated to keep going.

> It’s just not realistic to have someone drive halfway around the planet. I get that he’s in a giant rover, and so can traverse across obstacles much larger than the robotic rovers could. But he certainly wouldn’t be doing that at 25 kph.

I'm interested to know why exactly this is the case. Would the vehicle tip over too often? Would the tires wear out? Would the engine break down? And if these problems exist, will they always necessarily be there or would it be possible to develop a rover that could indeed traverse half the planet?

I had the same thought. The author talks about 25cm resolution cameras, and still being surprised by obstacles, but they are driving a rover that is more than 10x smaller than the vehicle driven in the Martian.

This article claims that the Dhofar desert in Oman is one of the closest analogs to Mars. If I tried to control one of the Mars rovers through it, I'm sure I'd hit some nasty obstacles, but I wouldn't worry much about rocks when planning to traverse in a Jeep.

1. https://apnews.com/article/deserts-oman-yemen-ap-top-news-ma...

The author is also probably used to driving with tens of minutes of latency. I would guess the current Mars driving experience is more of a planning experience, where an unexpected obstacle ruins the plan and creates an hour of delay from replanning and recommunicating. Whereas a human driver on site would have just steered slightly to the left and not thought twice about it.

I think this could maybe be answered better by a Dakar rally driver, as driving through a desert without roads with minimal waypoints or detailed maps and only field of vision would be a similar experience I guess.

The circumference of Mars is over 21,000 km/6,500 mi, with obviously no roads or any sort of support infrastructure. Travelling in the Australian outback or Siberian tundra for even a few hundred km requires painstaking preparation and contingency planning, with the first rule being "never travel alone". Expecting to traverse distances 100x longer solo, in literally uncharted territory, when a crack in the windshield can kill you is just not realistic.

To be clear, I'm not doubting the author's claim, I fully believe that it's an infeasible task.

I'm just curious what the specific problems that would arise would be. I don't know anything about off-road driving.

> you end up with lots of scenes where one character has to come across as clueless so that the other character can explain things to them (and to the reader)

The movie made this much worse. In particular, the scene where Donald Glover suggests a strategy for getting the returning ship back to mars sooner [1].

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4OJoFlWVyY

The audience reading the book is already filtered (probably) to people that would make this unnecessary, but for the joey beercans of the world that would never read a book (let alone this one) but watch the movie might actually find Glover's explanation still hard to understand.

That scene always made me laugh but more for the Project Elrond bit. Seeing as Boromir has to explain the meaning.

> So you end up with lots of scenes where one character has to come across as clueless so that the other character can explain things to them (and to the reader). This is not how normal conversations between people at mission control would go. Realistic conversations would be nearly incomprehensible to someone who is not an expert, thanks to all the shorthand. People wouldn’t be explaining things in great detail, instead other people would be cutting them off mid-thought, already seeing where they are going and jumping to the next logical conclusion.

Sounds a little like "everyone at NASA is a genius". Well, probably not. Routine stuff in mission control - ok. But when there's off-nominal stuff, there will definitely be people that have no idea what's going on and need extra explanations. People at mission control are highly specialized, I guess, so why should someone doing X instantly know what's going wrong with Y?

Also, there's administration, and some of those scenes are about convincing administrative people. They surely have technical understanding, but there would still be some explaining going on.

> In reality, upon being stranded, an astronaut would probably sit down and figure out in a few hours and a few pages of calculations what it takes Watney weeks, and lots of trial and error, to sort out.

No. Also astronauts are no all-knowing geniuses. They specifically are not looking for people that are incredibly awesome in certain areas and know everything about that topic, they are looking for people that do not underperform in any field. They don't need geniuses, they need workers who do a job that is pretty much pre-determined. And yes they need to be quick thinkers and stuff, need to be able to draw logical conclusions etc. But they definitely do not need to have all knowledge about any probably relevant topic in their head (as far as I remember Watney didn't have a dump of Wikipedia with him. Why the f ever they wouldn't send a copy with them. That'd be the first thing I'd put on a rocket to Mars).

For a more realistic depiction, along both Weir's suggestions (opaque explanations) and yours ("workers who do a job that is pretty much pre-determined"), I'd suggest Ian Sales's Adrift on the Sea of Rains which features a fictional commander stranded on a late-Cold-War moon base. Lots of jargon, no infodumps, no context for the reader (towards good literary effect).

In the grey gunpowder dust, he stands in the pose so familiar from televised missions. He leans forward to counterbalance the weight of the PLSS on his back; the A7LB’s inflated bladder pushes his arms out from his sides. And he stares up at that grey-white marble fixed mockingly above the horizon. He listens to the whirr of the pumps, his own breath an amniotic susurrus within the confines of his helmet. The noises reassure him—sound itself he finds comforting in this magnificent desolation.

If he turns about—blurring bootprints which might otherwise last for millennia—he sees the blanket-like folds of mountains, grey upon grey, and a plain of the same lack of colour, all painted with scalpel-edged shadows. Over there, to his right, the scattered descent stages of LM Trucks and Augmented LMs fill the mare; and one, just one, still with its ascent stage. Another, he knows, is nearly twenty years old, a piece of abandoned history; but he does not know which one.

A click from his radio reminds Peterson where he is. The voice of Major Philip Scott, USMC, his XO, follows: We’re about ready to make another evolution.

Peterson glances at the Omega strapped about his spacesuited forearm and sees that he’s been out for half an hour. The PLSS is good for a seven-hour EVA. He says, I’ll watch it from out here.

Andy Weir was on the 'Imaginary Worlds' podcast recently for anyone interested [0]. He's nominally plugging his latest book, but most of the interview is about how he came to write The Martian (when he was a software developer by trade)

[0] https://www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/episodes/weir-science

I think the martian reviewer is also a poorly developed character. He tells us almost nothing about the actual conditions on Mars.

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