THE MARTIAN (2014)
By Andy Weir
Crown Publishers, 369
pp. 9780804139038 (e-version)
* * * *
Human beings are pack animals, which helps explain our
fascination with such asocial themes such as hermits, survivalists, and
marooned individuals. We can't help wonder what we would do if stranded on a desert island or cast adrift in the
sea. Think of movies such as Jeremiah
Johnson, Cast Away, All is Lost, Into the Wild, Wrecked, Behind Enemy Lines…. We
are obsessed with the very idea of staying alive against long odds, as in Hunger Games or Survival. Of course, there is Western culture's most famous example
of desperate individualism, Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe, a book seldom out of print since it appeared in 1719. What would we
do if we were literally the last person on earth?
As we see in all such productions, the islands are not "desert" atolls devoid of
all survival tools, food, and water, or the film/book/show would be a very
short one indeed. Likewise, the "last" person usually isn't–he or she
is part of a small band, or a Friday materializes somewhere in the narrative.
Andy Weir's page-turning science fiction novel ups the ante. What if you really
were the last person alive in an
environment with no soil, food, water, or air? What if there was no Friday to
offer companionship and you knew if wasn't remotely possible for a rescue team
to reach you for four years, assuming anyone even learns you did not perish in
the accident in which your crewmates thought you were killed? When would you
ingest toxins provided for such an eventuality?
The Martian has been accurately called
an amalgam of Apollo 13 and Cast Away. Some time in the near future
the crew of the Ares 3 Mars mission is conducting experiments on Mars when a
freak dust storm tears an antenna from its moorings and impales their
colleague, Mark Watney, sending him tumbling down a ravine. The crew has
seconds to enter escape pods and head for the mother ship before the storm
envelops them. There's nothing that can be done as Watney's suit was punctured
and the commander's reading of Watney's suit monitor confirms death, probably
from an explosion of his blood vessels occasioned by sudden and total
depressurization of his space suit. There's nothing to do but save themselves
and return to the ship to mourn during their two-year journey back to earth.
Except Watney doesn't die. His own blood seals the puncture
and he manages to scramble back to his habitat. Emergency self-surgery is the
easy part. How can he survive in a hab unit with air, food, and water designed
to sustain for months, not years? And Watney can't contact anyone–that
suit-piercing antenna was part of the communications array. Mark's a
resourceful guy, but each time he runs the supply numbers, the math comes up
short–by several years. Should he just inject himself and become a for-real
casualty?
Two things transpire, the details of which will astound
science geeks. First, NASA has left behind all kinds of space junk–rovers,
habitats, old suits, solar cells, etc.–that can be jerry rigged, especially by
an outside-the-box thinker like Watney. He even figures out how to produce some
soil for crops, though the explanation isn't for the squeamish! I'm no
scientist, but Weir's explanations of how Watney produces food, air, and water sound
plausible. But Watney also knows that if he has any chance of rescue, he will
have to time a rover drive to the Ares 4 landing site at exactly the right
time–a daunting task as it's 2,000 miles away, he'll have to recharge the
rover, and its top speed is 15 mph. Are you up for a four-month drive in a
vehicle you can't leave? And even if everything goes right, it's still going to
be a crawl to the end in which he could die before rescue.
Once Watney begins to move about, an observant NASA official
notices the activity. But what to do about it? As we are reminded in Weir's
taut novel, NASA has to jump through political hoops, not just scientific ones.
I don't want to give away too much, so suffice it say that this is a beat-the-clock
story akin to The China Syndrome or The Andromeda Strain (with much better
science). There is also the question of how long one can live with one's self, a
reminder that hermits are more romantic in fiction than in reality.
Weir's book is thought provoking, smart, and intense. You
don't have to be a physicist to read it (though it would help), nor do you have
to be a sci-fi fan. (I don't read much sci-fi, though I loved this book.) The Martian is ultimately about the will
to live versus real and imagined limits. It makes us contemplate hope, human
ingenuity, and our personal tolerance for unspeakable loneliness. Rob
Weir
Note: To the best of my knowledge, Andy Weir is not related
to yours truly.
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