I consider being poorly-read to be among my greater character flaws, so you should automatically take anything I have to say about literature with a grain of salt. Well, “literature” might be stretching the definition, seeing as I usually only read biographies and paperback beach novels. We’ll wait until I get through the entire works of Shakespeare, and try to sum that up in 10 minutes before the real depths of my illiteracy show themselves.
That being said, The Martian, the story of one astronaut’s struggle to survive while stranded on Mars, is almost certainly one of the worst written books I have ever read. Now, what’s there to unpack within a sentence that harsh and seemingly vitriolic? Well, it doesn’t mean that the book isn’t enjoyable, because it is: Weir has a really entertaining premise that he explores with great excitement and a propulsive sense of plotting. I also don’t want to imply that his chosen background for approaching the material is invalid: Weir’s career in sciences is obvious with every lovingly explained chemical reaction, description of a tech spec, or moment of stakes-raising number-crunching, and it’s because of his passion for science that long passages spent puzzling out answers for high school math/chemistry/biology/physics questions can be very engaging.
My problem with The Martian is that the specificity of its author’s skillset is made abundantly clear by anything that doesn’t feel like it belongs in a textbook. Compelling characters, interesting dialogue, ambient descriptions -all the things that let you invest in a novel, instead of feel free to immediately dispose of it upon completion- are missing from The Martian. The book’s narrative structure relays events in the past tense, so most of the time you’re just being told what the story was. When Weir does break format, it’s jarring, and clearly signals a necessary perspective shift for dramatic effect. It also usually means dealing with the secondary characters, a rabble of paper-thin cutouts that talk like Internet commenters at the hyper-caffeinated pace of Amy Sherman-Palladino characters. The book is wall-to-wall with the smartest people in the world, so hearing them spew nothing but sarcasm makes NASA sound more alien than anything on Mars.
Weir’s understanding of the internal workings of advanced space machinery seems sound, but he doesn’t have a blue print to follow when writing his protagonist. Disguising dated pop culture references as a personality, spending months with the book’s hero becomes a patience-testing chore. Sure, we expect astronauts to be hyper-competent to the point of blandness, but at least someone who’s boring won’t make bad Reddit jokes all day. The Martian is essentially the Apollo 13 of space novels, a uniquely premised and fast-moving exercise in problem solving with a smarmy streak that goes from eye roll-worthy to outright irritating about halfway through.