The movie “The Martian” starring Matt Damon is a success.
That’s encouraging, but the book it’s based on is MUCH better.
It’s a classic “shipwrecked” survival story, but the protagonist is on Mars.
Still… can a fictional survival story set on another planet really tell us anything very useful?
I think it can, and does.
As science-fiction goes, the book The Martian is very “hard” science fiction, that is, it is very much based on real science. Andy Weir, the author, was a long-time software developer (and thus obviously very intelligent, and a person of top-notch character, ahem…) who happens also to be a great fan of NASA and at least borderline obsessed with space exploration. The book is, relative to the genre of science-fiction, hyper-realistic. Yes, he takes a few liberties here and there for the sake of the narrative, but by and large the Mars that it is set on is the real Mars as we understand it today, the engineering is real engineering to the point where some of it has already obsolesced, and the “rules” of spaceflight have been taken so seriously that the author wrote a software program to calculate relative orbits, and thus had to choose a specific future date for the flight (not revealed) for everything to work.
The author seems not only to work with but to revel in the technical details, and it’s what makes this book, he’s assuming that the reader is not afraid of such subjects. I heartily wish more authors would make that assumption.. or were capable of writing that way.
Not only does the author tackle a situation where the protagonist has to create the basic elements to sustain life (air, water, food) given little to work with, but he’s made the entire story seem very believable. A long shot, but not impossible. Nowhere near as ridiculous as, say, 99.9% of the crap that passes for science fiction on screen now.
It’s sort of what that stupid ’60s film Robinson Crusoe on Mars might have been but wasn’t. Comparisons to Tom Hank’s Cast Away are also easy.
I first read it three-and-a-half years ago as of this writing. I’ve read it four times now, and I’m starting to get the itch again, it’s that much fun.
In some deeper discussions I’ve compared it to Cryptonomicon, even though there’s very little superficial similarity. They aren’t even the same genre, but I remember being impressed at the level of intelligence that Cryptonomicon was written for, and encouraged that it succeeded in the marketplace. Same feeling I had about Heinlein, way back in the day.
On January 20th, 2013, as soon as I completed it, I said there was a better-than-even chance it was going to be a movie. Surprise!
In my opinion there’s nothing really wrong with the movie, except that it’s a movie, it can’t go into the depth that the book does, and that depth is the huge strength of the book. Whatever its failings, they are the failings of movies as a story-telling medium. Again, the great strength of the book is that it’s hard science fiction, “hard” by even 1950’s standards, and so much more so today when you cannot enter the “Science Fiction” section of any normal bookstore without being assaulted by dragons, orcs, unicorns, trolls, inexplicably energy-independent zombies, lustful werewolves and lovesick vampires… even in those rare bookstores that DO have a separate “Fantasy” section where you might expect such stuff to stay. The only failure of the movie is that the book is largely about science and engineering and inventiveness in a universe very close to reality as we perceive it now, subjects that lend themselves to and are in fact built upon symbolic methods to convey concepts, sometimes non-trivial concepts. Movies are, of course, visual more than symbolic, great at conveying emotions and feelings but more difficult to use in conveying complex ideas.
______________
So, back to the book, what can we really learn from a science-fiction story about survival on mars?
It may sound like I’m waxing a little philosophical here, but bear with me.
One of the major themes, often the major theme of survival as a subject, is that survival generally means lowering the applied level of technology to solve problems, usually as the infrastructure supporting the usual level of technology that solves those problems for us fails to function. Knives are carried in survival kits of all types and sizes because edged tools/weapons were are first and are still the most basic implements of mankind, and they can, with effort, take the place of a thousand cutting jobs that are done for us in our everyday lives. Lighters, matches or firestarters are carried in case our infrastructure of furnaces heating our houses and buildings or the heaters in our cars fail, or microwaves and ranges are no longer available to cook our food, or we no longer have our beds and comforters to retreat to. Weapons are survival tools for when we don’t have the police and military rushing to defend us, and so on… we substitute tools for infrastructure, and thus we emulate out ancestors who didn’t have that infrastructure.
In almost no cases do we use or have emergency tools that are higher-tech than the infrastructure that we’re substituting for. In some cases it’s because the infrastructure itself tends to assimilate new technology much faster than available individual tools do, but that is an over-simplification. The manual tools that we fall back on tend to be highly-evolved, simple and elegant solutions to the problems they solve, and RELIABLE.. when your state-of-the-art sports car fails you, and old Jeep may still work, if that fails you a horse and wagon will work, but it doesn’t work the other way. The higher the technology behind a tool, the less independent, versatile, predictable and reliable the tool tends to be, because low-tech is the product of thousands of years of refinement with life-and-death stakes, whereas high-tech is typically a designer’s idea of what will sell. Bottom line, the concept of high-tech gimmickry as survival equipment is and always has been pretty ludicrous.
However, all of this changes as we leave the egg-like relative safety of our own native ecosystem and finally take our first steps on a larger scale- and The Martian reflects that in it’s realism in depicting problem solving on another planet. Whatever humans make it to other planets, there aren’t going to be many technophobes, Luddites and Earth-Firsters… and I strongly suspect that those few that do make it out there early are not going to last long. Without being nestled and coddled in the fall-back environment of our native planet the level of technology needed to simply sustain life is MUCH higher, needs to be MUCH more robust and reliable than the technology we depend on now, and those who want to survive will have to be much more capable and conversant with technology in general than even the technophiles and professionals (myself included in both camps) are now.
For a long, long time to come off-world survival will be all about the tech, and the mastery of the tech. There’s simply no other way. If you can’t or won’t do that… better not go. The environments that humans will be dealing with all day, every day are “hostile” to a degree almost unimaginable here, and the technology needed to sustain our fragile lives is never going to be simple- so life will be about mastering the tech.
As a result, humankind in the future will no longer have the freedom we do now to treat technology as a luxury, as dispensable. The minimum “floor” of technology needed to sustain life will have been raised considerably, and we can’t drop below that level and live.
The various national space agencies have recognized this to a large degree, but at the huge expense of custom-fabricating virtually all of their hardware because consumer-level hardware is simply inadequately reliable for their needs. You also see that approach in some specialized fields, aviation, medical equipment, military gear, but all of it is horribly expensive and considered far more than consumers need. That’s going to have to change as we inevitably become more and more dependent on our technology.
Having millions of people routinely relying on devices that can’t be allowed to get wet on a very wet planet, that can’t stand a drop onto a hard surface when we live on hard surfaces, devices that routinely malfunction or lock up in the course of ordinary use just highlights the problem. This isn’t going to work going forward, certainly not off-planet. We are going to need to get all of our tech past that stage as it changes from luxury to absolute necessity… and it’s about time we got started, that as a culture we simply start rejecting unreliable technology as unacceptable in any context. These are no longer just toys, they’re vital.
______________
Just as fascinating in some ways as the content of the book is the back-story of how it came to be. Andy Weir has told the story for the record several times and I won’t presume to try to do it here, just search Youtube… but it was very much a grass-roots thing, and one of the facets that is most interesting is that it indicates that it is now possible for a good story to become known, popular, in-demand and profitable before ANY publisher sees fit to approve of it. The old gatekeepers of what we are allowed to read are fast fading into obscurity. As with so much in our society, once they were facilitators, the ones that actually did the work behind the scenes to make books available to us, but for decades now those services have not been needed by society at all, everyone possesses the ability to copy and distribute books at virtually no cost, they have devoted the great majority of their time to preventing that from happening, restricting all distribution to their ancient channels and none others, thus actually subtracting value from the products they handle rather than adding value, and convincing our governments that one of their most important functions is to preserve the profitability of obsolete business models, and stifle all technologies that are ready to replace them.
I can’t pretend I’m sorry.
– Robert the Wombat