The Martian & Artemis

I've wanted to see Ridley Scott's film The Martian for a while but I've never spotted it on any streaming service I've had a subscription on. (Finland had the world's third most lacking Netflix selection some time ago and that probably has not improved.) Then I stumbled upon an even better thing: the Andy Weir novel the movie is based on. I also read Weir's later novel, Artemis, right after it.

The Martian

I knew the general idea of The Martian beforehand: a Mars mission goes awry and an astronaut gets left behind. Stranded on the red planet, he plans to survive by farming potatoes until a possible rescue mission is attempted. What I didn't know is how entertaining the novel would be: I laughed out loud multiple times.

The novel is also great at evoking, uh, whatever the feeling is when a guy you're cheering for succeeds at something. My favorite moment in The Martian was when the NASA people back on Earth learned where and why the astronaut, Mark Watney, was driving one of the interrupted mission's rovers. Reader only learns about it then as well because Mark mischievously uses a mission codename for his little trip and doesn't reveal the details of what he's planning.

The only thing that bothered me in the prose was the Finnish translation by Kaj Lipponen. Mostly it reads fine but often times Lipponen didn't bother coming up with more Finnish-like expressions and dialogue has clunky, literal translations from English. For instance, when a ship commander orders a crew member to calculate an orbit or something, he says simply "Matematiikka." which I guess is "Math." in the original. In Finnish it sounds clumsy to me, not something anyone would use as a single word order. Oddly formal too when the crew were otherwise talking in a rather casual way.

The Martian is hard science fiction, meaning it's scientifically accurate. Or at least tries to be. I expected to find a section on the novel's Wikipedia page pointing out inaccuracies but there was none. Instead I found it in the film adaption's article. The very first thing that's not true to life is the dust storm that sets the whole story in motion. While 190 km/h winds on Mars are possible, it would feel like a breeze at best (due to the thin atmosphere, I assume.) Mark's potato farm would have also failed as Mars soil has been found to be toxic to plant and animal life.

One detail that I personally found odd was how Mark thought no one would be aware that he was alive until he got a radio connection back to Earth working. The thought of NASA using satellites to see how the site looked didn't even cross his mind. Of course he could have sent only one-way short messages then with arranged rocks like he does later in the novel. But still, Mark is clearly very smart: he should have known. Then again, he's not perfect, he makes mistakes too.

I dread adversities and misfortunes in these kind of stories. They tend to feel incredibly unfair for the protagonist. Aren't they in a bad enough trouble already? Does everything need to go wrong?  Even worse is if the protagonist does dumb stuff that could've been easily avoided. Luckily The Martian pushes through the hardships with Mark's great attitude. He works beyond my understanding of chemistry and such too, thus the mistakes he makes aren't infuriating. They're something your average person wouldn't even get a chance to commit.

Weir purposefully avoided describing the novel's characters unless it was relevant to the plot:

"It's weird, when I write, I just see a sort of blob of protagonist. [...] I also I know a lot of people, including myself sometimes, when reading a book you get a mental image for yourself of what you think the character looks like and it's like, OK, this is how I envision the character. Then if the book tries to physically describe a character, your brain rebels. It's like, 'no, no, he doesn't have black hair, he has brown hair. And no he's not really tall, he's kind of short' and all of that stuff."

I am very much like that. I don't pay too much attention how characters are described as. However, I did wonder how Mark Watney looked like after spending a year and a half in solitude on Mars. His stench gets noted at the end but not if his beard and hair had grown disheveled like usually happens to assumed-male protagonists in robinsonades. The Martian never mentions if Mark retains the means to shave etc. or if he maybe doesn't bother to.

Artemis

Artemis is pretty hard scifi as well and has a similar witty writing style to it too. It was entertaining but not as funny as The Martian.

The novel could be a prequel to The Expanse: Artemis, the first city on the Moon, has been founded and its inhabitants are a fairly exotic mix of ethnicities (like The Expanse tends to have). In the novel, Kenya has become a considerable space nation, offering a launch location for space rockets in the equator where it's most cost-effective. The woman who pretty much orchestrated Kenya's rise, Ngugi, is also the mayor of Artemis.

The novel's protagonist is Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara. She's a smart young woman who has lived in Artemis since she was six. Instead of taking on a more respectable profession like her welder dad would prefer, Jazz does deliveries and smuggles goods. She is offered a huge amount of Moon bucks for a bit more criminal gig and her adventure is ready to begin.

There was nothing really wrong with the novel, I think. But compared to The Martian it just wasn't as special.