The Berkeley High Jacket


Newsletter

The best of the Jacket, delivered to your inbox.

News Print
December 28, 2024 Login

Book texture: Andy Weir

Sylvia Burns on November 22nd, 2024

Andy Weir writes hard sci-fi, a genre in which the story, although fictitious, adheres as closely as possible to real-world laws of science. His works include “Project Hail Mary,” “Artemis,” and “The Martian.” “The Martian” chronicles the survival of astronaut Mark Watney on Mars, and every challenge and solution Watney faces are practical. If Weir wants Watney to grow potatoes on another planet, he has to work out in feasible numbers how much water and space the astronaut needs. The ideas in Weir’s sci-fi are so fun and satisfying that the writing isn’t even lacking in imagery, or the plot in character development.

Most of the prose in Weir’s books is bare description, dialogue, and sarcasm. A lot of my favorite books have lyrical, aesthetic styles, carefully crafting sentence rhythm and sketching with all manner of striking verbs and adjectives. Weir’s books don’t. The style is neither particularly poetic, nor stylistic in any blunt or flashy way. His word choice and sentence length are predictable, so the writing feels common. However, the joy of his books isn’t the fantastic writing. It’s the ideas that the writing conveys. Any given scene focuses on a scientific problem and its solution. Watney has to make 600 liters of water, so he pulls hydrogen out of rocket fuel to make it. Not all the hydrogen is reacting to make water, so his base is turned into a ticking bomb. So he sparks the reaction in tiny bursts to avoid an explosion-inducing flame. He spends page after page on problem-solving. There isn’t room to have anything else going on in his brain, be that description or character development, and Weir’s books don’t need it. As much as I like my pretty synonyms for blue and feel-good journeys of betterment, reading about ideas and understanding why they work is gratifying.

Interestingly, my favorite of Weir’s books, “Project Hail Mary,” has the best emotional-driven storytelling, and is the least realistic. The protagonist, middle school science teacher Ryland Grace, is much more sympathetic than either of Weir’s other main characters. The ending of the book is driven by the friendship Grace develops with the alien Rocky. My favorite parts of the book were the least realistic — learning about the new kinds of aliens Weir thought up. Character are important even in hard sci-fi like Weir’s. However, some of my least favorite parts of his books were also character details. The protagonist, Jasmine Bashara, in “Artemis,” is arguably Weir’s most developed protagonist, but I would much rather be reading about welding in a vacuum than her love life. Comparatively, Grace’s friendship with Rocky has Weir’s fantastic ideas snuck into it, because Rocky is an alien! 

All in all, decent and engaging characters might be helpful to enjoy reading a book, but  Weir's work can teach us that forcing character growth doesn’t always make a story better!