Huh. I like a good take down, but I don't think you found anything here. You're right that it's an obvious throwback to earlier science fiction - there's a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama that I found very telling. It's extremely close in tone to Clarke's writing, all the way down to the corny dialogue and paper-thin characterisation.
But yeah, it's all about that sciencey enthusiasm. Which you can dislike... but so what? If you want to make something of the absences of the book - like the meaningful discussion of how human society is messing up the planet - you'll have to tell us what should have gone in there, and why that would be better. Otherwise, why not just let pulp be pulp?
I'd say he did find something there. The absence precisely. Personally i see quite easily what he means, what kind of existential meta reflections still feel needed and expected in good Sci-fi.
Just because the Martian, I wouldn't have dare watching this one anyway. But i'll probably re-watch Pandorium, a German/US gem from 2009. Check it out.
I'm so over the "people always turn into cannibals/murder gangs" trope. Just refuse to watch it any more. It wasn't very interesting in The Road, but at least McCarthy can write. In the first season of Walking Dead it gave shape to the narrative, I suppose, but after that, in all the endless copies and spinoffs, it's just turned into a meaningless reflex. I couldn't watch the new 28 Years because it started with this idea.
Sorry, bit of a rant. I've just been wanting to complain about this cannibals thing for a while!
😂 no problem, see how a raw lament is good? you're right on the cannibal gangs thing, it's been an era, subversive at the beginning till (as any hot stuff) it will be mainstreamed to death for the masses then tailored and used for social engineering. Idem, the 28Years is a no no. Won't even try.
Phil said pretty much what I’d like to comment, so I’m seconding his take. This review felt kinda empty. The reviewer didn’t care for the humor style and wished the science was more fiction-y. Okay.🤷♀️
Wouldn’t you criticize erotic fiction that failed to be erotic? Weir’s book can’t help be a story about climate change and human civilization. And yet the science is lame, and the global political fantasy he constructs is vacuous.
Haha, yeah, but... It's called science fiction, not climate change fiction! I don't think it is necessarily about climate change. That's a major global issue right now, but not every end-of-the-world sci-fi has to be about it. (Apart from anything, climate change is not an end of the world issue. It's bad, but it wouldn't wipe out humanity even if we did nothing. So it's end of the world scenarios aren't a very good analogy for climate change.) Science fiction often addresses the end of the world, in ways that aren't necessarily directly connected to current political crises.
The global political fantasy... yeah, was vacuous. I just read it as adopting the Star Trek global government idea wholesale.
I didn't think the science was lame, I thought it was fun! Space travel that obeyed relativistic principles. Alien lifeforms that were complex and weird but amenable to investigation with the scientific method. A solution based on ecosystem engineering...
Anyway, I'm not going to persuade you it's good, if you didn't like it. There is plenty to criticise in there. But I thought it met all the criteria for good hard sci-fi. It's no... I dunno... Handmaid's Tale (what is?). But it's very much of a piece with Clarke, Asimov, and their ilk.
I didn't like the movie either (didn't read the book), but not for your reasons. I don't care that it wasn't about climate change or critical of humanity. There's plenty of that sort of thing out there. It just felt very..fake. The humans were not real people. Gosling has NO family or friends or love interest? He has no feelings about the end of the world? He just derps about quirkily and prettily? Unbearable. The linguistics of the movie (Rocky and Grace's magical ability to communicate) also made zero sense, and that was (painstakingly) half the movie.
The thing I think we agree on is that there were many ultra-cringe moments. Generous of you to not mention the song.
100% agree on the lack of human emotion from Gosling’s character. It was, believe it or not, much worse in the book. Andy Weir can only describe two emotions convincingly: agony over not being able to solve an engineering problem, and elation at solving an engineering problem.
Yeah. This is the equivalent of ordering crab when you don't like shellfish. You can't adequately judge the quality of something when your main critique is the very notion of what that thing is.
Building a narrative out of textbook science class concepts is this writer's entire schtick. If you hate that concept as a baseline, it's hard to say if the writer is doing it well or not.
I enjoyed the movie for the feel-good buddy comedy that it is, rather than actual sci-fi with anything meaningful or substantive to say. Appreciated your take. (I thought I was going to read the novel but think you have convinced me otherwise.) The only quibble I might have with your review is your questioning why a European government is held up to be the best candidate to lead an international/interstellar project like this--even though your observations about the current state of affairs are accurate, I hope you are not implicitly contrasting it against the US with the view that the latter is better in resisting the rise of fascism and ignoring of international laws ...
To clarify: Hail Mary’s B plot is a fantasy for competent technocratic world leadership which Europe symbolizes to American mid-brow centrists. It’s hard to stomach at this moment when I’m reading daily headlines about Reform, AfD, the Rassemblement National gaining momentum, and when Europe’s double standards with regard to international law reveal it for what it is—the junior partner of declining American global hegemony. A political fantasy should depict some sort of alternative, rather than the carcass of the status quo.
Fair enough. As I said I wasn't disagreeing with your observations about Europe, but the context in which they appear could be read (or maybe it's just me) as your argument that the novel/movie should have given the leadership role to the US, because somehow they are the ones fighting the good fight for international law and against fascism ...
I have no patience for this kind of pro-European chauvinism. Europe is a collection of imperialist powers with deeply reactionary streaks and voting bases. Norway, the country in question, VERY NEARLY elected it's own Trump last year. Not that it matters if any of these bloated bourgeois nations were to have him or not -- please ask Africa how much it has enjoyed Europe's commitment to "liberal values" or whatever they call it over the last several decades.
It was not my intent to champion Europe in that regard. As I wrote in a separate response to the original author, I wasn't disagreeing with the observations about Europe, but the context in which they appear could be read (or maybe it's just me) as an argument that the novel/movie should have given the leadership role to the US, because somehow they are the ones fighting the good fight for international law and against fascism. And THAT would be the ground I am not willing to cede.
Some "goals" are themselves worth critiquing -- one can attest that some goals are bad/unnecessary/uninteresting in-and-of-themselves. One COULD very well launch an attack on the entire form of haiku because one doesn't care for its "goals."
What Weir is doing is insipid. Science fiction SHOULD offer more than he is willing to offer, and he lacks the speculative imagination to ask/answer some pretty important questions that a real science fiction writer would ask in such a scenario as he has illustrated. It has a "goal," yet it has no "point."
Shouldn't an author possess a basic understanding of the themes he intentionally introduces? Don’t write a contact story inspired by climate change if you want to evade the can of worms of our impending civilizational disaster, and that’s pretty easily done—just have your heroes save the Earth from Ming the Merciless instead of climate-changing microbes.
The book IS countercultural. The literary end especially of the SF genre has marinated in pessimism and cynicism about humanity for so long that a golden retriever writing about his human seems like a breath of fresh air. Weir’s refusal to have any even small-p politics at all is kind of the message: “I just like space stories and I don’t want to have to grapple with anything” … I hate this term but it’s kind of reactionary
who knew this book had an entire militia of online shooters? anyways, as someone who HAS identified with nerd culture and subculture, and who should (at least in theory) enjoy nerdsploitation lit, I also find it shamefully vacuous. The Rick and Morty of novels or something
I don't know. The movie might be insubstantial but this review has no abundance of substance either. So Weir's writing is cheesy and unrevolutionary, the movie more of the same, a critique that can be levelled at so much of our cultural output nowadays. "We should all be alarmed," and this may very well be true, but the review doesn't make a cogent case for such alarm. Instead, we get self congratulatory assertions of "being a hater" and "hate-reading," with only superficial synthesis of what makes the material so hateful. I'm sympathetic to the sentiment, but the execution is missing something.
I would argue that this review is worse than the movie, because at least one piece of media inspires some sort of emotion. This review pretty much had no critical analysis past "this wasn't what I expected and therefore it's not good", and felt judgemental more than anything.
I haven't read the book yet (and I won't, after slogging through The Martian and being annoyed the entire time). But I had the same thoughts you have about the movie. For me, it tried to be too much at once, lowest common denominator style: Was it about saving the Earth? Was it a buddy pic? Was he going to have a love interest with that government lady? I felt like it skimmed everything. Annoying is exactly the word I used to describe the movie after it finally ended.
Fantastic article. Seems to me works like this author’s are a sort of propaganda covering over the increasing distance between scientific works and the individual human. The scientific work I (and others working for industries) know is vast, bureaucratic, impersonal and leaves little time for Brave Little Toaster stories.
You still believe climate “catastrophe” is a thing? lol, have a look at how the catastrophic RCP 8.5 scenario has been amply disproven. I think people need the ecoleft theology of apocalypse to exist, irrespective of the truth of it or not.
I read PHM back to back with Peter Watts’ Blindsight, which is a similar plot, travel in a spaceship to save humanity, but with the polar opposite worldview.
Blindsight leaves you with a pessimistic, and maybe realistic, view of humanity. I loved it.
PHM is not about humanity, and it never even occurred to me that it was about climate change. I had no desire to see the movie because it looks like it would be for kids.
I think Weir is a nerdy guy that wants to write about fun science ideas. Saying there is no room for Weir in science fiction is like saying there is no place for jocks in the gym. Science fiction is allowed to be about science, even if it’s corny as hell.
I do not want all SF to be like Weir, but there is a place for what he does.
I feel so sorry for what’s going to happen when you discover Golden Age sf. It will be rough for you. You may need a warm cuppa and maybe a Little Red Book.
(Seriously, the implication that sf can only have value if it’s revolutionary should have died long ago. Weir’s prose is clunky and sometimes the characters are embarrassing (looking at you, _Artemis_), but you’re focused on his failure to write about what you want him to write about, which is an attitude both grotesque and somehow trite. )
Yep. The most successful part of The Martian (for me) was the conflict within NASA in how to deal with the problem - that was interesting - PHM just felt a constructed, manipulative crowd pleaser based on focus-group generated moodboards. It was Shaggy and Scooby-Doo in space.
Huh. I like a good take down, but I don't think you found anything here. You're right that it's an obvious throwback to earlier science fiction - there's a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama that I found very telling. It's extremely close in tone to Clarke's writing, all the way down to the corny dialogue and paper-thin characterisation.
But yeah, it's all about that sciencey enthusiasm. Which you can dislike... but so what? If you want to make something of the absences of the book - like the meaningful discussion of how human society is messing up the planet - you'll have to tell us what should have gone in there, and why that would be better. Otherwise, why not just let pulp be pulp?
I'd say he did find something there. The absence precisely. Personally i see quite easily what he means, what kind of existential meta reflections still feel needed and expected in good Sci-fi.
Just because the Martian, I wouldn't have dare watching this one anyway. But i'll probably re-watch Pandorium, a German/US gem from 2009. Check it out.
I'm so over the "people always turn into cannibals/murder gangs" trope. Just refuse to watch it any more. It wasn't very interesting in The Road, but at least McCarthy can write. In the first season of Walking Dead it gave shape to the narrative, I suppose, but after that, in all the endless copies and spinoffs, it's just turned into a meaningless reflex. I couldn't watch the new 28 Years because it started with this idea.
Sorry, bit of a rant. I've just been wanting to complain about this cannibals thing for a while!
😂 no problem, see how a raw lament is good? you're right on the cannibal gangs thing, it's been an era, subversive at the beginning till (as any hot stuff) it will be mainstreamed to death for the masses then tailored and used for social engineering. Idem, the 28Years is a no no. Won't even try.
Phil said pretty much what I’d like to comment, so I’m seconding his take. This review felt kinda empty. The reviewer didn’t care for the humor style and wished the science was more fiction-y. Okay.🤷♀️
Wouldn’t you criticize erotic fiction that failed to be erotic? Weir’s book can’t help be a story about climate change and human civilization. And yet the science is lame, and the global political fantasy he constructs is vacuous.
Haha, yeah, but... It's called science fiction, not climate change fiction! I don't think it is necessarily about climate change. That's a major global issue right now, but not every end-of-the-world sci-fi has to be about it. (Apart from anything, climate change is not an end of the world issue. It's bad, but it wouldn't wipe out humanity even if we did nothing. So it's end of the world scenarios aren't a very good analogy for climate change.) Science fiction often addresses the end of the world, in ways that aren't necessarily directly connected to current political crises.
The global political fantasy... yeah, was vacuous. I just read it as adopting the Star Trek global government idea wholesale.
I didn't think the science was lame, I thought it was fun! Space travel that obeyed relativistic principles. Alien lifeforms that were complex and weird but amenable to investigation with the scientific method. A solution based on ecosystem engineering...
Anyway, I'm not going to persuade you it's good, if you didn't like it. There is plenty to criticise in there. But I thought it met all the criteria for good hard sci-fi. It's no... I dunno... Handmaid's Tale (what is?). But it's very much of a piece with Clarke, Asimov, and their ilk.
I haven't read or seen PHM, but this article read like the that guy who complained that Turning Red didn't acknowledge 9/11
I didn't like the movie either (didn't read the book), but not for your reasons. I don't care that it wasn't about climate change or critical of humanity. There's plenty of that sort of thing out there. It just felt very..fake. The humans were not real people. Gosling has NO family or friends or love interest? He has no feelings about the end of the world? He just derps about quirkily and prettily? Unbearable. The linguistics of the movie (Rocky and Grace's magical ability to communicate) also made zero sense, and that was (painstakingly) half the movie.
The thing I think we agree on is that there were many ultra-cringe moments. Generous of you to not mention the song.
Song was brutal, and now I can't say I don't know who Harry Styles is.
100% agree on the lack of human emotion from Gosling’s character. It was, believe it or not, much worse in the book. Andy Weir can only describe two emotions convincingly: agony over not being able to solve an engineering problem, and elation at solving an engineering problem.
literally lol'ed. you've pinpointed what is so unbearable about the character haha
Yeah. This is the equivalent of ordering crab when you don't like shellfish. You can't adequately judge the quality of something when your main critique is the very notion of what that thing is.
Building a narrative out of textbook science class concepts is this writer's entire schtick. If you hate that concept as a baseline, it's hard to say if the writer is doing it well or not.
Most textbooks are an offense against reading. As an ex teacher, I feel like hating the schtick is perfectly legitimate.
Excellent. I haven't seen The Martian or Hail Mary since I don't believe that was any reason to invent the subgenre of 'Space MacGuyvor'.
I enjoyed the movie for the feel-good buddy comedy that it is, rather than actual sci-fi with anything meaningful or substantive to say. Appreciated your take. (I thought I was going to read the novel but think you have convinced me otherwise.) The only quibble I might have with your review is your questioning why a European government is held up to be the best candidate to lead an international/interstellar project like this--even though your observations about the current state of affairs are accurate, I hope you are not implicitly contrasting it against the US with the view that the latter is better in resisting the rise of fascism and ignoring of international laws ...
To clarify: Hail Mary’s B plot is a fantasy for competent technocratic world leadership which Europe symbolizes to American mid-brow centrists. It’s hard to stomach at this moment when I’m reading daily headlines about Reform, AfD, the Rassemblement National gaining momentum, and when Europe’s double standards with regard to international law reveal it for what it is—the junior partner of declining American global hegemony. A political fantasy should depict some sort of alternative, rather than the carcass of the status quo.
Fair enough. As I said I wasn't disagreeing with your observations about Europe, but the context in which they appear could be read (or maybe it's just me) as your argument that the novel/movie should have given the leadership role to the US, because somehow they are the ones fighting the good fight for international law and against fascism ...
Everyone has their opinion. I like the book and the other books by Weir. I also think your interpretation is hilariously wrong
It's a preoccupation of his that shows up in The Martian as well: the whole world briefly coming together to collaborate on a science project.
I have no patience for this kind of pro-European chauvinism. Europe is a collection of imperialist powers with deeply reactionary streaks and voting bases. Norway, the country in question, VERY NEARLY elected it's own Trump last year. Not that it matters if any of these bloated bourgeois nations were to have him or not -- please ask Africa how much it has enjoyed Europe's commitment to "liberal values" or whatever they call it over the last several decades.
It was not my intent to champion Europe in that regard. As I wrote in a separate response to the original author, I wasn't disagreeing with the observations about Europe, but the context in which they appear could be read (or maybe it's just me) as an argument that the novel/movie should have given the leadership role to the US, because somehow they are the ones fighting the good fight for international law and against fascism. And THAT would be the ground I am not willing to cede.
I feel like a literary critic should have some understanding of what the author is trying to do.
Do you get mad when you read haikus because they only have three lines and don’t rhyme? Damn it, Basho, get with the program!
Some "goals" are themselves worth critiquing -- one can attest that some goals are bad/unnecessary/uninteresting in-and-of-themselves. One COULD very well launch an attack on the entire form of haiku because one doesn't care for its "goals."
What Weir is doing is insipid. Science fiction SHOULD offer more than he is willing to offer, and he lacks the speculative imagination to ask/answer some pretty important questions that a real science fiction writer would ask in such a scenario as he has illustrated. It has a "goal," yet it has no "point."
Shouldn't an author possess a basic understanding of the themes he intentionally introduces? Don’t write a contact story inspired by climate change if you want to evade the can of worms of our impending civilizational disaster, and that’s pretty easily done—just have your heroes save the Earth from Ming the Merciless instead of climate-changing microbes.
Not seen the film but loved the book, so it's a great big thumbs down and a booooo from me. I think you need a softer target.
The book IS countercultural. The literary end especially of the SF genre has marinated in pessimism and cynicism about humanity for so long that a golden retriever writing about his human seems like a breath of fresh air. Weir’s refusal to have any even small-p politics at all is kind of the message: “I just like space stories and I don’t want to have to grapple with anything” … I hate this term but it’s kind of reactionary
who knew this book had an entire militia of online shooters? anyways, as someone who HAS identified with nerd culture and subculture, and who should (at least in theory) enjoy nerdsploitation lit, I also find it shamefully vacuous. The Rick and Morty of novels or something
The mechanics work. The vertigo is missing. That’s the whole problem. But pulp used to have more nerve than this. Anyway I loved the movie anyway
I don't know. The movie might be insubstantial but this review has no abundance of substance either. So Weir's writing is cheesy and unrevolutionary, the movie more of the same, a critique that can be levelled at so much of our cultural output nowadays. "We should all be alarmed," and this may very well be true, but the review doesn't make a cogent case for such alarm. Instead, we get self congratulatory assertions of "being a hater" and "hate-reading," with only superficial synthesis of what makes the material so hateful. I'm sympathetic to the sentiment, but the execution is missing something.
I would argue that this review is worse than the movie, because at least one piece of media inspires some sort of emotion. This review pretty much had no critical analysis past "this wasn't what I expected and therefore it's not good", and felt judgemental more than anything.
I haven't read the book yet (and I won't, after slogging through The Martian and being annoyed the entire time). But I had the same thoughts you have about the movie. For me, it tried to be too much at once, lowest common denominator style: Was it about saving the Earth? Was it a buddy pic? Was he going to have a love interest with that government lady? I felt like it skimmed everything. Annoying is exactly the word I used to describe the movie after it finally ended.
exactly -- it certainly "edged" the entire time
Fantastic article. Seems to me works like this author’s are a sort of propaganda covering over the increasing distance between scientific works and the individual human. The scientific work I (and others working for industries) know is vast, bureaucratic, impersonal and leaves little time for Brave Little Toaster stories.
You still believe climate “catastrophe” is a thing? lol, have a look at how the catastrophic RCP 8.5 scenario has been amply disproven. I think people need the ecoleft theology of apocalypse to exist, irrespective of the truth of it or not.
I read PHM back to back with Peter Watts’ Blindsight, which is a similar plot, travel in a spaceship to save humanity, but with the polar opposite worldview.
Blindsight leaves you with a pessimistic, and maybe realistic, view of humanity. I loved it.
PHM is not about humanity, and it never even occurred to me that it was about climate change. I had no desire to see the movie because it looks like it would be for kids.
I think Weir is a nerdy guy that wants to write about fun science ideas. Saying there is no room for Weir in science fiction is like saying there is no place for jocks in the gym. Science fiction is allowed to be about science, even if it’s corny as hell.
I do not want all SF to be like Weir, but there is a place for what he does.
Gee-wiz! Hard sci-fi uses 80's tropes?
I feel so sorry for what’s going to happen when you discover Golden Age sf. It will be rough for you. You may need a warm cuppa and maybe a Little Red Book.
(Seriously, the implication that sf can only have value if it’s revolutionary should have died long ago. Weir’s prose is clunky and sometimes the characters are embarrassing (looking at you, _Artemis_), but you’re focused on his failure to write about what you want him to write about, which is an attitude both grotesque and somehow trite. )
Yep. The most successful part of The Martian (for me) was the conflict within NASA in how to deal with the problem - that was interesting - PHM just felt a constructed, manipulative crowd pleaser based on focus-group generated moodboards. It was Shaggy and Scooby-Doo in space.