I closed off 2019 with what I figured would be a reasonably quick read. I saw the movie when it came out... years ago, and liked it enough to plan to read the book but not enough to actually pick the book to read. After years of reading increasing numbers of mixed reviews, I picked it up on a whim and see both all the praise and all the criticisms.

Watney is an ingenious astronaut stranded on Mars after an accident who has to somehow survive until help shows up with limited supplies and things constantly breaking on him. Outside of the (admittedly very cool) setting, it's a pretty standard survival story where Watney juggles barely finding the means to survive with barely avoiding gruesome death for a few hundred pages.

There are two things that I think significantly set The Martian apart: one is the framing of Watney writing about his own experience shortly after these issues happen through typed (and occasionally spoken) journal entries. For the non-journal portions, Weir's writing is kind of whatever, but Watney's voice comes through these segments so perfectly that you may as well be reading someone's journal about how they almost died today and tomorrow this is how they're going to try and fix it. When Weir makes a bad joke, it's like Watney making a bad joke. When Weir needs an arbitrary complication in the plot, it's typically revealed by Watney's "Oh fuck I'm going to die."

The second thing would be the emphasis on cooperation. Watney is on his own for much of the book, but there are also lots of chapters that involve NASA working as hard as humanly possible to bring him back alive. It's clearly a bit optimistic (like the general public can pay attention to an issue for that long in reality) but there's a thread throughout the book that really hammers home that Watney can't survive without help from NASA, and the support for saving Watney is almost entirely borne by compassion. God knows how many people would be living happier lives during the rescue if they just let Watney die, but they don't. They work harder than ever to create even a marginally better chance that he can get back home. It's heartwarming at times.

But there are a lot of "eh" things about the book, too. Whenever Weir isn't writing Watney's logs, his writing is at least as boring as this review. There isn't a notable style, the pacing is pretty much constant, there's no evidence of anyone having a character other than "mildly disagreeable nerd," and the solutions rarely seem to have much effect on Watney's actions, which is pretty much the only thing to care about. While compassion and cooperation are clearly important themes in the book, most of the characters are ornery and flat enough that Weir apparently feels the need to spend the last two pages beating the idea like a dead horse instead of almost anything less annoying. Troubles never seem to last more than a chapter or two, and most of Watney's attempts to not-die succeed on the first try with plucky application of either duct tape or hacking stuff to shreds. It usually reads fine, but occasionally some seemingly difficult problem is resolved so easily that it's a bit of a bummer.

And while Watney's jokes are mostly amusing and most of the cringy ones come across as him being a loser, the bit about ninja-pirates was awful and took way the fuck too long to disappear.

On the whole, this was a great survival story with a bunch of not-great parts involving not-survival elements. Watney is a great character among a sea of non-characters, but does sort of turn out to be a Gary Stu most of the time.

Still better than the movie, at least.