Speaking my truth re. The Martian by Andy Weir
I was inspired to read The Martian in 2026 after watching and loving Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling. Having never seen The Martian starring Matt Damon, also based on an Andy Weir novel, I figured it was a good time to read the book before watching the 2015 film, as both are fairly highly acclaimed. I was disappointed.
To Weir’s credit, I felt compelled to finish this book. The macro-level storytelling is very engaging, and there is a good balance between suspense and slower-paced story development. It’s thoroughly satisfying to experience Watney’s tribulations and subsequently follow along as he utilizes his training, resources, and ingenuity characteristic of NASA astronauts to solve the life-threatening puzzles in front of him (she thinks she’s part of the team).
However, I have MAJOR issues with the micro-level exposition and dialogue. On top of it being quite clunky and often so ‘quirky’ that it becomes cringe inducing and distracting (pirate-ninjas… I’m just very hard-pressed to believe that someone skilled and intelligent enough to be on Ares II would have such extremely primitive Reddit-coded sense of humor), Weir also reveals his own subconscious casual misogyny through Watney’s communications with the rest of his NASA team. There were two moments that especially bothered me. Immediately after reading both, I felt the need to pause, roll my eyes behind my head, and lose respect for Weir before continuing reading.
To be clear, these are not moments wherein the reader - me - mistakes purposefully antagonistic characters or rhetoric as representative of the author's personal views when they are in fact not. This is not a Lockjaw/Paul Thomas Anderson situation. No, these moments are expressions of the main character, the titular protagonist, The Martian, Mark Watney, who is clearly meant to be the protagonist in every sense of the word and who the audience is rooting for throughout. Watney is not even given any character flaws to overcome through the story; he begins and ends the book as a good-humored, loyal, resourceful team player who was thrown into an extremely unfortunate position by fluke. No, the crux of the story is Watney overcoming his environmental and physical challenges rather than any actual character development. Which is fine! It worked for me! Except that it reveals Watney as a sort of vessel for Weir’s values and humor…
The first moment I had to pause to lose respect for Weir was in one of Watney’s messages to Kapoor via Pathfinder. They are discussing the investigation committee, and, insinuating that the committee are a bunch of ‘blow-hards’ or something like that, Watney asks Kapoor to tell the committee that “each and every one of their mothers is a prostitute […] P.S. Their sisters, too.” What about their wives, Watney? Are their wives not also prostitutes?
It’s honestly almost impressive that Weir could fit so many layers of casual misogyny into less than two sentences. In order to insult the committee, he insults the women in immediate proximity to the committee. And in order to insult these women that have not wronged or even interacted with him in any way, he calls them prostitutes, presumably one of the worst and most demeaning things Weir thinks a woman could be. Why does he insult these proximal women and not the committee directly? Perhaps he assumes that there are no women on the committee for him to directly call prostitutes. He doesn’t even use the derogatory slang for prostitutes (whores), which could at least be somewhat more defensible as an intended insult. By the way, this is the first and last time in the entire book that the investigation is brought up. It is not relevant to the rest of the story whatsoever. It is there exclusively to communicate that Watney is loyal to his crew and intends to defend them from investigation (by calling the committee's female family members prostitutes). Weir, you’re so gay for this.
The second moment is in Watney’s communication with one of his female crewmates, Johanssen. Johanssen is one of two women on the crew, the other being Commander Lewis. Johanssen is the crew's computer scientist. Johanssen's character exposition is mainly that she's hot, and that she's in a clandestine relationship with one of the male crewmates. Watney's first direct message to Johanssen when resuming communication, after being stranded on Mars, is this:
"Johanssen:
Your poster outsold the rest of ours combined. You're a hot chick who went to Mars. You're on dorm-room walls all over the world. [...] Did you know Commander Lewis had a chat with us men? If anyone hit on you, we'd be off the mission. [...]"
This is meant to be Watney being quirkily and harmlessly honest. I say this although I can't help but be extremely uncomfortable reading this as an omniscient observer, let alone as Johanssen and this being addressed to me. He might as well have told his highly accomplished female colleague that "18-year old boys are jacking off to you and splooging into their socks as we speak, and if 'us men' were left to our own devices, we'd be all over dat ass." I'm sure she would've felt even more respected and empowered by such raw honesty.
I understand that this is me trying to be chill at the function but can't help noticing that misogyny bleeds through the cracks of normal interactions. It came out in 2014 after all, before even gamergate, but I also can't excuse it. I'm only a couple pages into Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, and I can already feel the difference in not only quality of writing, but also thematic significance and subtle sense of humor. I can't help but feel that Weir is tragically overrated after reading The Martian, although I'm hoping that I'm wrong and that he developed substantially as a writer between The Martian and Project Hail Mary...
