The Martian
The first time I picked up The Martian I only made it two pages in before I rolled my eyes so hard that I had to put the book down and step away. It took a month before I was ready to try again. The exposition is...clumsy. Straight out of a story I or one of my friends might have written when we were 14 and had just discovered fanfiction.net. I guess that's what you get with self-publishing.
The author's voice eventually faded into the character of Mark Watney. It helped that he introduced a bunch of other characters back on Earth around page 50. And while they may have been two-dimensional, they at least distracted from Watney himself and made the story a bit more bearable. But ultimately I didn't like this book. It was fast and readable, so I finished it pretty quickly, but I came out of it feeling angry and condescended to.
Andy Weir doesn't seem to trust the reader. He reiterates plot points pages after they've happened, because they're about to be relevant again. He can't distinguish between technical things that need to be explained (making water from rocket fuel) and things that have passed into common knowledge (the basics of how solar cells work, i.e. they turn sunlight into energy). He's so concerned with explaining every little detail that halfway through the story he switches from a first person journal to a third-person omniscient voice in order to introduce a disaster that Watney wouldn't have been able to diagnose the cause of. It all adds up to a portrait of a man who just has to make sure that you know how smart he is. It's very off-putting.
Despite this, I do have high hopes for the movie. There's a solid story here. One that would have benefited from the advice of an editor. The movie's script is by Drew Goddard, whose work I've largely enjoyed, and I have confidence that Matt Damon can turn Mark Watney into an interesting and likable character. Getting some other voices into this story can only improve it. This is one case where I'm confident that the movie will be better than the book.
The author's voice eventually faded into the character of Mark Watney. It helped that he introduced a bunch of other characters back on Earth around page 50. And while they may have been two-dimensional, they at least distracted from Watney himself and made the story a bit more bearable. But ultimately I didn't like this book. It was fast and readable, so I finished it pretty quickly, but I came out of it feeling angry and condescended to.
Andy Weir doesn't seem to trust the reader. He reiterates plot points pages after they've happened, because they're about to be relevant again. He can't distinguish between technical things that need to be explained (making water from rocket fuel) and things that have passed into common knowledge (the basics of how solar cells work, i.e. they turn sunlight into energy). He's so concerned with explaining every little detail that halfway through the story he switches from a first person journal to a third-person omniscient voice in order to introduce a disaster that Watney wouldn't have been able to diagnose the cause of. It all adds up to a portrait of a man who just has to make sure that you know how smart he is. It's very off-putting.
Despite this, I do have high hopes for the movie. There's a solid story here. One that would have benefited from the advice of an editor. The movie's script is by Drew Goddard, whose work I've largely enjoyed, and I have confidence that Matt Damon can turn Mark Watney into an interesting and likable character. Getting some other voices into this story can only improve it. This is one case where I'm confident that the movie will be better than the book.
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