Yes, but they don't let people from the internet be astronauts, and this is probably why. I confess I didn't finish The Martian, which is something, because I have a fairly high tolerance (I was trained at the Steven Segal Academy of High Cheese). But it did read like being force-fed someone's not terribly interesting blog. Which might be fine, but you're stuck on Mars and fighting for survival. Surely a bit of that might bleed into what you're writing? Oh, hold on, I'm going to use an exclamation mark! That'll do it. Yay! Your all so gay!
So, we've got teen blogger stuck on Mars. Let's run with that plot. Let's forget about metaphor, simile, allusion, and all that rhetorical junk, and line up some dull pedestrian words and make them cross the page. Let's make sure that our character has no interior life, and while we're at, no exterior life. Wait! Phew, got that exclamation mark out of way. We learn those at Astronaut School!
Then there's the episodic problem-solution plot. It's like Macgyver without Richard Dean Anderson. That like ice cream without ice and cream. Problem announces itself, endless dull exposition follows, and then yay, saved again! Mars is so gay! I like disco. He doesn't seem terribly concerned about his constant iterations with near disaster. People get more animated trying to find the exit from a large car park.
Can it be saved by the science? Well, given the number of errors in the chapters I read, no. You might as well make up some shit and have Morgan Freeman narrate it – that I can believe. Firstly, as I said before, it starts off with a wind storm on Mars. Now, I've never been to Mars, but I'm sure the wind has to work pretty hard to get dust into the atmosphere, even given the lower gravity, owing to the fact the surface pressure on Mars is about 0.6% of what sea-level is on Earth. There's simply not enough atmosphere to blow over large objects.
Anyway, my will to live locked itself in the cupboard under the stair are refused to come out until stopped reading the chapter about potatoes. Then my inner botanist, so aggrieved at the laboured nonsense, went to join it. They'd only come out when I promised not to read any more.
Sorry, it's just one those (many) things I don't get. I could ignore it, but people keep saying 'you should read it, it's great'. No, I really shouldn't and no really, it isn't. And to prove it, Ridley Scott is making it into a movie. Ain't no come back from that: we've seen the awesome suckiness of Prometheus.
