Very topical I know. After watching and being completely awe-struck by the movie adaptation, I was in all practicality, obliged to read Andy Weir’s source material to see if it could possibly be better than the movie adaptation.
Long story short its hard to say its outright better than the movie adaptation, but thats not bashing the book, thats praising the movie.
The book, just like the movie has a highly captivating plot (as can be expected by Weir), and the Grace’s character is effortlessly funny in both forms. What I did prefer of the book Grace was the persistent background noise of specific callouts to random technology and phenomena and jargon in general that the movie lacked. I can’t name any of the top of my head, but point being, Weir clearly did his due diligence on practically every paragraph, and that is really satisfying..
Besides Grace, Stratt offers a nice foil to his character. Grace is quippy and sarcastic, whereas Stratt is serious and pretty much shoots down anything Grace says immediately. For me at least two contrasting main characters gives a nice dynamic throughout a story. The pairing is only present for a small portion of the total book, given its dual-narrative.
From my experience, dual-narrative books tend to be really hit or miss. There are some that do it really well, and some that just have you waiting impatiently for it to switch back to the other narrative. This book was definitely the former, both narratives are fun to read, and Weir ties them together very elegantly. The presence of the secondary narrative serves directly to explain happenings of the main, all while have a satisfying link as to why they happen, that in the grand scheme of things keeps you in the same reference frame, despite being set an unfathomable number of miles apart. The amnesiac explanation is a quick and dirty way of explaining it, and it works amazingly. The movie doesn’t decide to make that apparent to the viewer, but instead uses that scene to provide a light comedic relief in a rather dark plot point.
That brings me to the one thing that I think the movie does better, probably from its inherent ease in showing the reader things. The pacing overall is rather more fun. The opening sequence in specific, Grace finds out his situation in a matter of what you would think is less than an hour. In the book however, Weir decided that Grace would experiment his way to the solution, which while was fun to read, wasn’t as fun as it was to watch Grace stumble about for the exposition of the movie, and be thrown with a complete curve ball whilst being half-drunk.
Thats most of what I have to say about the book and the movie. But then there’s DuBois.. how could I forget DuBois. DuBois (in the book), has probably the stupidest role. He’s supposedly a 3 (or 4) PHD doctor, so he’s obviously a very smart man. They say with smartness, comes eccentricity, but I would put this a step further, into just plain weird. I won’t get into the specifics, but if you have read it, you probably know what I’m talking about, and I hope it stuck out as much as a sore thumb as it did to me. I think Weir even felt that way, and inspired him to inflict what happens to DuBois in the following chapters…
Overall, really great read! The writing wasn’t a literary masterpiece, but it was fun, nerdy, complete scientifically, and had a really compelling plot, and as whats marketed as a hard sci-fi book, it more than delivers on that promise.