4 ms·

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 inte

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.