Andy Weir, author of The Martian , explains that the key breakthrough in writing his novel came when he realized that "science creates plot." He certainly isn't the first sci-fi writer to prefer rigorous science over fanciful detail—back in 1865, Jules Verne described a trip to the moon that anticipated many of the key details of the later Apollo project. John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar was so accurate in predicting the future ,(well, now it's the present) he deserves the title of seer. The dystopian technologies of Orwell and Huxley show up nowadays in the daily news. Even so, few genre writers have pushed technological realism to the extreme achieved by Weir.
What does Weir really mean by creating plot with science? Here’s an example encountered midway in the novel, when Martian castaway Mark Watney finds himself forty meters away from his breached living quarters, which just lost all its breathable atmosphere, and his broken spacesuit is also rapidly leaking air. At this dramatic moment in the book, Weir conveys his hero’s predicament in the following terms:
The suit is designed for eight hours of use. That works out to 250 milliliters of liquid oxygen. Just to be safe, the suit has a full liter of O2 capacity. But that’s only half the story. The rest of the air is nitrogen. It’s just there to add pressure. When the suit leaks, that’s what it backfills with. The suit has two liters of liquid N2 storage.
Let’s call the volume of the airlock two cubic meters. The inflated EVA suit probably takes up half of it. So it took five minutes to add 0.2 atmospheres to 1 cubic meter. That’s 285 grams of air (trust me on the math). The air in the tanks is around 1 gram per cubic centimeter, meaning I just lost 285 milliliters.
The three tanks combined had 3000 milliliters to start with. A lot of that was used to maintain pressure while the airlock was leaking. Also, my breathing turned some oxygen into carbon dioxide, which was captured by the suit’s CO2 filters.
Checking the readouts, I see that I have 410 milliliters of oxygen, 738 milliliters of nitrogen. Together, they make almost 1150 milliliters to work with. That, divided by 285 milliliters lost per minute…
Once I’m out of the airlock, this EVA suit will only last four minutes.
Fuck.
Did you follow all that? We will have a brief quiz at the end of today’s period. Make sure you get the grams to milliliters conversion correct.
Other sci-fi authors would probably start with the final expletive, and perhaps mention the four minutes of remaining breathing time. But what commercial author would dare include the preceding four paragraphs, with their precise calculations? Are there really enough nerds out there to buy a book of science fiction that contains more science than fiction?
I have a barroom bet for highbrow drinkers that has always paid off. Hand your boozing companion a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises , and bet the next round that any page, chosen at random, will mention either food or alcohol. Trust me, this pays off with better odds than owning a bloody casino. Well, I now have another barroom bet, suitable for tech workers and science wonks. Hand them The Martian , and wager that any random page will include some measurement—whether of space, time, energy, storage, or another scientific variable. Keep Weir’s book by your side, and you will drink for free at every watering hole in Silicon Valley.
I suspect that Weir would never have gotten a book contract (and a movie deal!) if he hadn’t first published this story himself, and found a large, enthusiastic audience. When he initially uploaded The Martian on to his website in 2011, the publishing industry paid no attention to this West Coast software developer, the son of an accelerator physicist dad and electrical engineer mom. In fact, no one in the book biz really took notice for two years, not until the e-book version of The Martian started selling more than 10,000 copies per month. Agents had turned down his previous overtures, but now one approached him, and soon had a deal for an audiobook. A few weeks later deals fell in place for a hardcover book and a motion picture.
By 2015, everyone was a Mark Watney fan, including movie audiences in the 81 countries where the film version of The Martian was released, as well as the folks at NASA who launched a website to allow fans to follow the fictional astronaut’s trek across the Martian terrain.
And what was the story of this blockbuster hit, once you stripped away the measurements and tabulations and formulas? It’s actually one of the oldest in the history of the novel. Back in 1719, when the rules of narrative fiction were in flux, and the conventions of the modern novel were still under construction, Daniel Defoe published his classic work Robinson Crusoe . A British mariner finds himself stranded on a deserted island after a shipwreck, and must find a way to survive and, if possible, return home. Weir’s book The Martian takes this story and translates it to Mars, where our intrepid castaway has been left for dead by his fellow astronauts. But Mark Watney is still alive, and faces the daunting task of overcoming almost insurmountable obstacles in his quest to return to planet Earth.
These obstacles involve lack of communications with NASA, shortages of food, broken equipment of various sorts, limited water supply and a host of unanticipated problems caused either by Mars or Watney’s own mistakes. Adding to the degree of difficulty, his best chance for escape from the Red Planet requires him to travel thousands of kilometers to the planned landing site for the next Mars expedition.
If this were a typical sci-fi story from the Golden Age, Watney would enlist the support of extraterrestrials, engage in battles and ambushes, and maybe even have a fling with a Martian princess. Such was the survival plan practiced by swashbuckling John Carter in Edgar Rice Burroughs' popular Martian novels from a century ago. Carter never had trouble breathing the Martian atmosphere or dealing with food shortages—although he did take advantage of the weaker gravitational pull of his new home, which gave him a key advantage in hand-to-tentacle combat.
Ah, Mr. Weir doesn't play by those traditional rules of pulp fiction (or, rather, the lack of rules). Instead his hero conquers the challenges of Mars one equation at a time. Give Weir credit that for making this unlikely approach to storytelling work, and not just for a few pages, but for the entire duration of a medium-sized novel.
I wouldn't recommend this book to most readers, or even to most fans of genre fiction. If you gauge the success of an adventure story by its fight scenes or body count, take a pass on The Martia n. But if you find artistry in the rigor and symmetry of analytical thought, or if you like heroes who conquer with intellect instead of their fists (a tradition that dates back to the Odyssey ), or if you just want to read a plausible story about how a real-life castaway might find his way back 250 million kilometers to home base, this m ay become one of your favorite novels.
Yet how odd that one of the most surprising science fiction novels in recent memory succeeds simply by taking the science seriously and mixing it with one of the most familiar plots in the history of fiction. That may seem like a tepid formula, but in this instance it produced a runaway hit and cross-platform brand franchise. With a opening gambit such as this, it can only be a matter of time before Mark Watney heads off to Jupiter, Saturn and points beyond.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).
Andy Weir doesn't play by the traditional pulp fiction rules. His hero conquers the challenges of Mars one equation at a time.