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A review by serotiny11
The Martian by Andy Weir
adventurous
funny
informative
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
Fun at first but after a while I wished I had just watched the movie. First the good points—super imaginative format, really creative on the problem solving front, and well-researched.
But. There’s no character development to speak of - many of the characters are flattened to a single character trait that becomes their entire personality. The author does not seem to be interested in psychology at all and more into the science problems and survival…which would sure make for a fun space movie, but dragged as a story, for me anyway.
The whole book was a series of life-or-death scenarios that Mark would invariably get out of the very next day through a combination of wild ingenuity and unbelievable good luck. Every single time. Which made the pacing and outcome of each scenario increasingly repetitive and predictable. As this was originally published as blog posts, makes sense, but really reads like an exercise the author was entertaining himself with—what crazy problem can Mark deal with today, and how will he solve it? Each one was interesting individually and would be great as a blog post but as a book, ehh.
Last issue I had was with Mark's entries themselves. There were weird tense issues at the beginning that threw me off, and he would go back and forth between using very technical language, but then explain something really obvious like what CO2 stands for…I was wondering who his log entries were actually intended for? Surely not just NASA, surely not just laypeople…I keep coming back to this book feeling like a fun science-writing experiment for the author that doesn’t entirely work as a novel.
Ok one more…Mark became increasingly unlikeable for me….juvenile jokes became his whole personality (funny at first, but got old), and there was a casual use of some language related to s*xual assault that kicked me right out of the book.
Sigh…definitely fun at times, but not nearly as good as I had expected.
But. There’s no character development to speak of - many of the characters are flattened to a single character trait that becomes their entire personality. The author does not seem to be interested in psychology at all and more into the science problems and survival…which would sure make for a fun space movie, but dragged as a story, for me anyway.
The whole book was a series of life-or-death scenarios that Mark would invariably get out of the very next day through a combination of wild ingenuity and unbelievable good luck. Every single time. Which made the pacing and outcome of each scenario increasingly repetitive and predictable. As this was originally published as blog posts, makes sense, but really reads like an exercise the author was entertaining himself with—what crazy problem can Mark deal with today, and how will he solve it? Each one was interesting individually and would be great as a blog post but as a book, ehh.
Last issue I had was with Mark's entries themselves. There were weird tense issues at the beginning that threw me off, and he would go back and forth between using very technical language, but then explain something really obvious like what CO2 stands for…I was wondering who his log entries were actually intended for? Surely not just NASA, surely not just laypeople…I keep coming back to this book feeling like a fun science-writing experiment for the author that doesn’t entirely work as a novel.
Ok one more…Mark became increasingly unlikeable for me….juvenile jokes became his whole personality (funny at first, but got old), and there was a casual use of some language related to s*xual assault that kicked me right out of the book.
Sigh…definitely fun at times, but not nearly as good as I had expected.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment
Minor: Rape