The Martian Isn’t All Wet
The reviews are in, and it’s looking like the early buzz was right: Ridley Scott’s big-screen adaptation of Andy Weir’s breakout sci-fi success The Martian is being hailed as “hands down the best thriller of the year.” It’s not all that surprising: the book has attracted legions of fans that eclipse those of most any other SF release in ages (in September, it sat atop Barnes & Noble’s SF/F bestseller lists in three formats: hardcover, trade paperback, and the budget-friendly mass market paperback), but as someone who will pay to see pretty much anything with a spaceship in it in the theater, it’s heartening to see both the stellar Tomatometer score and the out-of-this-world box office predictions.
It’s been quite a journey for Weir, who self-published the book serially on his website before he found a publisher, assuming only the nerdiest of science nerds would care about an ultra-realistic depiction of one stranded astronaut’s struggles to survive the harsh environment of the Red Planet. Yet it has won equal praise from brainy engineers, who respect his careful attention to scientific detail, and readers of all stripes, who love the thrilling story communicated in an unforgettable narrative mode: via the stream-of-consciousness diary of the astronaut himself, the memorably potty-mouthed, ever-resilient Mark Watney.
And then! And then things got even better. With timing right out of a screenplay, NASA scientists this week confirmed something that science fiction writers have been dreaming about for a century: yes, Virginia, there is water on Mars—and flowing water at that. And with the verified presence of water comes the tantalizing possibility of alien life (albeit tiny, microscopic alien life… but still! ALIEN LIFE. FOR REAL).
We got a chance to ask Weir a few questions about the big news in-between his interviews with news outlets from Al Jazeera to The Washington Post. The author confirmed that, as you might expect, traveling to Mars was a childhood fantasy (“Every dorky kid grows up dreaming about going to Mars,” he said), and that, moreover, it is gratifying to see decades of speculation by science fiction authors confirmed by real science. “Liquid water on Mars is a game-changer. If there’s life on that planet, we’ll find it in that water,” he said—truly the stuff of thousands of SF stories.
But here’s the big question: with its careful attention to detail, how would The Martian be different had Weir written it knowing water truly existed on the Fourth Rock from the Sun? Easy: “I would have changed the scene where he flips the rover, so that it was caused by a briny flow,” Weir said.
Probably he’s kind of joking, but the probable success of the movie—and the amazing discoveries awaiting us on the surface of Mars—are no joke.
Will you be seeing The Martian this weekend?