4 ms·

Am I the only one who thought the writing wasn't particularly good? Disclaimer: I still haven't seen the movie. It kind of felt like a throwback to 1950s scien

• freehunter 11y ago
  I think it's pretty well acknowledged that he's not a terribly good writer. But he's a darn good storyteller, as it is entertaining and gripping from start to finish.
• defuzzified 11y ago
  Yeah, I felt the same way but the plot and the problems were so well done I didn't mind too much. He was a programmer before becoming a writer and so his style seemed like he was just iteratively solving cool problems to me. The movie does a great job with the characters though. One of the best films I've seen in a while!
• jandrese 11y ago
  I thought the framing device did a good job of covering for the thin characterization. We were getting his broadcasts to historians on the chance that he didn't survive. There were several places in the book where it cuts out for a few hours or days after a major setback, presumably while he goes through the cycles of grief before deciding to press forward. The movie was pretty good, the only thing I really missed from it was the infamous drill scene. That was a real emotional kick in the book, but I understand why they killed it for the movie (trying to keep the NASA folks from becoming a total sideshow in the third act).
  • bobwaycott 11y ago
    Yeah, I really missed the drill bit, too. I begrudgingly accepted it made some sense.
• smacktoward 11y ago
  No, you are not. I thought the same thing: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/10/book-review-the-martian/ http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/10/book-review-the-martian/
• AndrewStephens 11y ago
  You are not wrong about the writing, which was weak during the parts of the novel that concerned groups of people on Earth or the rest of the crew in space interacting. They all talked with one voice and seemed like stock characters instead of real people to me. However, the parts with Watley keeping his log on Mars seemed very true to me. Not the fictional occurrences but the tone and style seemed consistent with old-time sailors logs or autobiographies of people caught up in historical disasters. Interestingly, I attended a book club that discussed this novel, split about 50/50 between engineers and non-engineers. All the engineers agreed that the Watley parts were great and the rest was not so good, but the non-engineers almost uniformly had the exact opposite opinion! (The film is good)
  • ethbro 11y ago
    To be fair, it's probably more reasonable to judge it in the stream of epistolary / didactic literature than purely narrative. I remember Defoe's Crusoe and Stoker's Dracula not having particularly inspiring characters by modern standards either. It is curious about the divergence between engineers and non-engineers. If he ever writes another novel in the same vein, it'd be interesting to collaborate with another author and have a richly-characterized political story on Earth contrasted by a more "engineerly-characterized" space story. (Keep meaning to watch film, have not gotten to)
  • Grishnakh 11y ago
    >(The film is good) Ridley Scott could make a good movie out of even the lousiest book.
• xirdstl 11y ago
  I thought the same thing. I saw the movie first, and then decided to read the book because a friend said it was a lot better. I didn't finish the book.
• jryan49 11y ago
  I thought Watney's logs were well written. He felt like a real character to me. Everyone else, not so much.