How ‘The Martian’ gets it right
Ridley Scott’s latest sci-fi outing, The Martian, captures the plight of astronaut Mark Watney, abandoned by his crewmates to die on the Angry Red Planet during a life-threatening dust storm. It turns out he’s far from dead, though, despite being impaled by a radio antenna, and spends most of the movie figuring out how to survive on the cold, desolate planet until a rescue mission can be attempted.
It’s a gripping story of survival, yet it’s told on a world far away, where the usual rules don’t apply. Mark must grow his own food, create his own oxygen, even drink his own pee to survive. Yet it is one of the most inspiring space stories we’ve seen in recent memory.
For over a century, science fiction has concerned itself with imaginary worlds and little green men, dystopian futures and hostile invaders. It turns out the most gripping adventures involve man simply trying to figure out the problems in front of him, often using science and logic to move forward.
Recent fiction novels promote this viewpoint, such as Neal Stephenson’s epic lunar apocalypse, Seveneves, in which our moon explodes into seven pieces and the inhabitants of the International Space Station must carry earth’s seed into the future. The novel is chockfull of detailed descriptions of every bolt and fixture on the space station; this helps set up the problem-solving in space when things start going wrong. Then there’s Michel Faber’s recent The Book of Strange New Things which, though taking place in a space colony on a remote planet, focuses on the problems that regularly bedevil humans: loneliness and detachment from one’s own species. There are alien beings in Faber’s novel, but the main dilemma is that of Peter Leigh, a missionary sent to help his fellow colony members adjust to being cut off from earth — or so he thinks.
Further back, there’s also Jonathan Lethem’s novel Girl in Landscape, which echoes the John Wayne western The Searchers, albeit set on a remote, colonized planet where aliens are, at best, seen as savage inferiors. Of course, Philip K. Dick also introduced us to many a Mars colony, showing the nuts and bolts of humans trying to do their day-to-day jobs in hostile, alien environments.
But it’s the modern age that’s bringing “hard science” back to science fiction: though the average reader or moviegoer doesn’t know much more about space travel than they did during the first Apollo missions, there’s a wealth of hard scientific data about what can, and cannot, happen in space. And it’s not just the ability to be heard screaming.
A sci-fi movie like Gravity may have featured Sandra Bullock problem-solving under weightless conditions, but they weren’t the type of problems that couldn’t be handled by George Clooney’s helpful reaching hand or afterlife pep talk. The Martian, meanwhile, places Watney in an environment that’s not unlike camping alone in the Gobi Desert, with nothing but his wits and science to pull him through. The movie version perfectly casts Matt Damon as a wiseacre who salutes every good piece of news with mock enthusiasm (“I’m still alive. Yay!”) and restlessly works over every new problem. First, Watney must figure out how long his food supply will last — so he resorts to planting potatoes sent up by NASA to celebrate Thanksgiving, which he figures will grow the easiest. He also needs to generate oxygen and — most crucially — enough water to sustain himself and his plants.
There isn’t a lot of water on Mars. There’s ice at the poles, but they’re too far away. If I want water, I’ll have to make it myself. Fortunately, I know the recipe: Take oxygen. Add hydrogen. Burn.
This is where Andy Weir’s debut novel keeps up the momentum: plugging Mark into each new problem, and seeing how he’s going to work it through. This may sound like taking a boring MSAT test, but it actually makes for compelling reading. Weir’s novel is just nerdy enough to get the science right (he’s a computer programmer and a big astrophysics hobbyist), and smart enough to keep the rest of mankind on earth on the sidelines, breathlessly watching as their hero struggles to endure on a planet that keeps trying to kill him.
They say there’s a “law of three” when it comes to survival: you can live for three weeks without food, three days without water, and three minutes without oxygen. Watney faces all three of these shortages on Mars. And the novel makes his problem mankind’s problem. Both the book and the movie suggest that, no matter what difficulty mankind faces, scientific reasoning, and a lot of persistence, will help pull us all through.
In this way, The Martian is more Apollo 13 meets Cast Away than, say, War of the Worlds: it shows us how ingenuity — and a lot of duct tape — can solve a whole mess of problems out in space.
