Andy Weir's The Martian and the Beauties of Space Opera

I’ve watched The Martian as a movie before I’ve read the novel. I thought therefore it might spoil a lot of fun during my reading, however was excited to see how the novel itself showed another form of comedy and wit. Science fiction is a genre that I love, just because it is a fantasy that is heavily based on reality. The space opera movies that I came to love were Interstellar and The Martian, both rooted quite heavily in existing scientific researches and theories; All which I do not know so well about especially since the only science that I took for the past four years was biology, but because I do not know it so well I came to enjoy the mysterious feeling that is derived from my lack of knowledge in physics and cosmology. (I still remember how my friend in high school who was a physics geek commenting on all the errors that he spotted in Interstellar and how I told him to shut up.)

As soon as I opened up the first page into The Martian by Andy Weir, I was surprised by the amount of emotion and wit that I could feel within the first three lines, in which Mark Watney says “I am fucked”. The whole story was in first person of Mark leaving records in the basecamp of Mars, which was of course different from the movie which showed the whole event that happened before Mark was abandoned on Mars within the first 10 minutes. This was the first difference that I’ve noticed. Everything in the novel was being described by the protagonist, which made it really seem like an actual autobiography. I remember how my literature teacher in high school really stressed about how the format and tone is important when writing a creative text, which really applied to this novel particularly well regarding the whole storyline of Mark being stranded on Mars and ending up being rescued.

I was also later bombarded by the amount of scientific information thrown in my face within the text that has been massively cut out or replaced with visuals in the movie. And again, the lack of knowledge I had and therefore having to read the same paragraph over and over to at least catch a hold of what’s going on, really was the fun part of reading a work from the genre of space operas. As space and cosmology is still an area of science that is a mystery to a lot of people, the setting of the protagonist on Mars and his situation of having to survive in an environment which most of humanity hasn’t even laid a foot on really enhanced the feeling of anxiety and anticipation. Space opera is therefore what I believe to be a genre that is most heavily based on facts and actual researches but also the area that is still full of mysteries that many storytellers could expand upon using their imaginations.