Well, I might as well get this over with. It’s intimidating panning a book everyone and their mother seems to love. Please don’t come at me with pitchforks.
I will say this in The Martian’s defense, it has a stunning cover design and a really, really good premise. A clever botanist/engineer accidentally gets deserted on Mars and has to Macgyver his way to survival until someone can come back for him? Genius. If it sounds interesting to you at all, you should give it a try since so many people liked it. And actually, I’m pretty excited for the movie with Matt Damon because I think (hope) it’ll fix most of the issues I had with the book.
Alright, let’s talk about those issues:
1 – The writing is pretty good for a self-published novel, but it needs some serious editing to make it more readable. I get that Random House didn’t want to make changes after buying the rights, but it reads like a 3rd draft. And then there’s the dialogue which is just awkward as fuck. So much awkward. I wish I could pinpoint exactly what makes the dialogue so awful, but I do know most real people (even nerdy scientists) don’t talk like that.
2 – Mark Watney is about one step away from being a jokey robot. Dude gets rattled occasionally but then immediately rebounds with a silly joke (to varying success). Always. As Hermione Granger would say, he has “the emotional range of a teaspoon.” I get that many people (myself included) use jokes as a coping mechanism, but if you’re stranded on Mars for months or years and will probably die, it seems improbable that you’d never do some soul-searching. I felt like I never actually got to know the real Mark Watney because he never got real in his log entries. The book is hollow with no emotional center. Everything can’t always be: something bad happened, I’m going to certainly die, *insert poop joke here*.
3 – The pacing of the plot is off. The novel gets very monotonous very quickly. Something bad happens, Mark makes a joke, and then he fixes the problem. Rinse and repeat every other chapter. Maybe some people find that suspenseful, but it was actually pretty boring. I ended up skimming decent chunks just to get on with it.
4 – So. much. technobabble. It’s cool that Weir did his research, but at times I felt like I was being bashed over the head with it. And I’m a scientist! I can’t imagine non-sciency people enjoying it.
5 – It’s pretty depressing as fuck reading futuristic sci-fi where women are still heavily outnumbered in scientific professions.
6 – Maybe I’m a monster, but I felt like there should have been more discussion about whether it was worth the billions of dollars spent trying to save Watney. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth it, but in a world where multiple people can literally be saved with a $3 malaria net, there should have been more discussion of the money issue from the Earth side. Actually, I think there should have been more Earth characters in general. We never really get to meet Watney’s family and that’s a shame because it would have upped the stakes substantially.
Phew, it felt good to get all that out. Hope we can still be friends.
{I’m afraid to agree with you because my husband would divorce me but…you nailed it.}
I’ll keep your secret safe :) Wouldn’t want to cause a marital rift, lol.
I actually agree with you as well. I liked the book a lot more than you did in the end (I think I 4-starred it?) but each of your criticisms were things that had occurred to me as well. I suppose they didn’t bother me altogether as much, but you definitely nailed why this book wasn’t perfect.
You’re not wrong, but I still really liked it. Maybe Mark’s jokey robot was exactly what I needed. May be Andy Weir drank from the same fountain as Stephanie Meyer, able to turn subpar writing into an addictive opiate. I don’t know. But I do still like you.
He must have! I’d like to find out where that fountain is and drink from it :) But I really do have high hopes for the movie. It could be a great story visually and with a little story editing.
I see your words, but can’t make sense of them.
What is going on here?!
I absolutely feel you about being worried about the backlash when having to admit to not loving something pretty much everyone else has adored. I was so worried I wasn’t going to love this book, but I did. I do agree with you that it would have been great to read more about the characters on Earth, and from the rest of Watney’s crew, and I did question their willingness to spend quite such ridiculous amounts of money to save one guy. But it still really worked for me.
No pitchforks from me, at least until I can go and check how you’ve rated all the various Rainbow Rowell books. If you’ve panned any of them, then you may be dead to me.
I kid. Or do I?
Oh don’t worry, I’m a RR fan. Fangirl and Landline are all-time favorites, Attachments was fun if not altogether memorable, and E&P is on my tbr list.
Carry On (Simon Snow novel) comes out next month. Not that I’m counting the days or anything.
Impatiently awaiting the pre-order I already bought through the buy hole.
No heat from me.
In fact my review (http://cbr.bgwdesigns.com/2015/03/the-last-man-on-mars-is-super-quippy-also-in-mortal-danger-dun-dun-duuuun/) was much the same, though I did give it a few more stars.
Basically “The book was certainly entertaining. I read the book in a day and I enjoyed it, but for such a cool premise the book really could have been so much more; it read more like a geek’s orgasm over technology. I kept reading to find that edge, the edge that would finally test him. Trapped in a sandstorm in the middle of Mars? Quippy jokes for the satelites. Spend all day carrying heavy-ass space rocks? Quip-quip. Nearly lose all your food supplies and awake from the edge of death? Quip, quip, quip. It lost credibility.”
“a geek’s orgasm over technology” YES, this. So, so true.
You know we still love you, and I see wisdom in each of your points (well, almost). These things are what kept my rating at 4. The book read better to me than some things I’ve been rating at the three star level so I went ahead and went with the fourth star. But this is not a perfect work by any stretch and I was probably rating at a curve given this book’s status as a first time novel.
I am also cautiously optimistic that the movie will fix some of the editing issues the book had, because they have no choice but to cut.