The Martian
by Andy Weir
Elisa has been after me to read this for ages, and I knew I was going to like it, and I finally did read it and it was just as great as I thought it would be.
Two points of compare and contrast with Star Wars Episode VII, which I also saw last weekend:
While I noticed and appreciated the diversity of the other Hermes crew and NASA staff, I did wonder a few times what it would have changed to write Mark as not a man or not white or not straight. He's a blank slate for every nerd's fantasies about being a plucky funny clever quietly-badass MacGuyver who can jerry-rig anything in an hour flat. And like all nerds who are at least one of not male/white/straight, I'm very practiced at ignoring that and relating anyway, even though I now know that consuming this kind of media too heavily will rot my self-esteem as surely as too much Halloween candy will rot my teeth.
I guess, to echo literally everyone else, in the year of our lord two thousand and fifteen why am I still amazed that a big budget sci fi movie has a black man and a white woman as action leads (not to mention a flying Bechdel pass)?
I also hope that The Martian hasn't ruined me forever, re: standing up in movie theaters and screaming you can't run a spaceship into a bunch of trees/rocks/enemy fire and then just up and fly that thing back into space if you don't want to end up dead of decompression/explosion/suffocation/starvation/all of the above at once in an entertaining series of events.
Ok, I lied, one other thought about The Martian: something tells me that that the boot output screen of Pathfinder as published in the book is highly accurate, and when I imagine the author tracking people down to ask about the fine details of Pathfinder's boot process, I become very, very happy.