The Martian is first a wonderful novel in audio. As almost all of the book is from the lost Commander Watney's logs, only the small section of text that are from the perspective of either the crew of the Hermes or Mission Control on Earth are not written in the first person. While extremely entertaining, The Martian doesn't discuss extremely improbable or fictional events. While still fiction, it can be argued that the piece is more realistic non-fiction than science-fiction. This is only strengthened by the fact that so much of what Watney talks about is the technicalities of his problems, situations, and solutions. The technical aspect combined with how sarcastic and human Watney appears allows the reader to entirely accept the way the story progresses. This is perhaps ironic because at first glance The Martian seems like a comical laugh at the genre of science fiction novels. Its interesting that its so funny and yet this effect was accomplished by making the book more real and down to earth.
Something I’ve found to be similar is the podcast Wolf 359. The character that we follow, Communications Officer Doug Eiffel, also starts off his story through logs. Of course, he isn’t stranded or on another planet, but he does imbue the sort of comedic snarky-ness of Mark Watney. While searching the stars for any kind of irregular sound patterns around the star Wolf 359, Doug records his daily logs- which usually involve him talking to himself or his arguments with the rest of his crew about his hygiene. The idea is similar in that fantastic events seem rare onboard the Hephaestus ship, however some every-day things are often slowly revealed to be more than they seem. Most fictional aspects are introduced fro comedic purposes initially and then brought back later to make a point. For example, early on int he podcast, Eiffel and the commander try to escape their annual physical. They both create excuses of some kind of emergency they have to deal with however the commander’s claim of a “plant monster thats breathing, learning, and taking over the green house” appears ridiculous to every other member of the team. Only when it abducts the crew’s doctor in order to communicate through him- does the Eiffel start taking it seriously. Now, you might be thinking this sounds like it was literally ripped from several sy-fy movies and you couldn’t be more right. As if taken direction from Alien, the plant monster tells them that it is the best evolutionary species, that it can adapt and learn at exponential rates and is almost impossible to kill. The crew goes after the monster and it escapes into the vents. They realize certain things are going missing from their storage shed and that it stole a screwdriver from their tool box. Fearing that the monster is making something to kill them all they finally track it down to kill it. Only to find that it had only been taking fertilizer and needed the screwdriver to build itself a lamp. Being plant based, suddenly the terrifying danger of the being in Alien becomes a lot less horrific. The team decides to leave the plant monster be in its area on the ship.
Perhaps in a more extreme way, Wolf 359 definitely uses some aspects of famous sy-fy novels, movies, and TV series to a comedic effect. Even the name (if you haven't recognized it already) is in reference to a star in Star Trek that is also named Wolf 359. Where as The Martian pulls away from the fantasy in order to achieve a more impacting effect. Both are extremely interesting modern renditions of seemingly very plausible circumstances.
-Bridgette Olavage
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