seanpersaud replied to your post:I saw The Martian yesterday
I have this book sitting in front of me. I intended to read it before seeing the book but sometimes we don’t get what we want. Should I wait and read the book first or see the movie and read it after?
Because of how closely the movie tracks the book’s plot, whichever you do first is going to spoil you for the second. The way I did it (book first, then movie) certainly worked; there was plenty to enjoy in the movie even knowing what was going to happen. But I think it would work the other way, too, and might even work better, because:
- You’ll have the movie characters in your head while you’re reading the book. That normally seems like a potential downside to me, because much-loved book characters have a way of becoming over-simplified in movie form, but in this case I think the realistic-characterization arrow points the other way.
- You’ll get to experience the movie sooner and with a bigger audience, which I certainly enjoyed, and which ought to add to the fun.
- A lot of what was left out of the movie was the detail of how Watney worked out the solutions to his problems. And you can totally still enjoy that when you read the book. It will be like a super-bonus-extended version of the movie, since most of the parts left out could totally have happened off-camera in the movie as-shown.
I don’t know what sort of reading you’re into. When I was younger I loved sci fi, especially authors like Niven and Heinlein and Zelazny. Weir mentioned in one of his interviews that Heinlein was his favorite, and it really shows in the book, because the long sections of "smart person figures out complex technical problem while explaining it interestingly” could have come straight out of the pages of Have Space Suit - Will Travel or The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. For me it was wonderful to read an homage to those books, though that might not be as strong a factor for someone who wasn’t raised with them.
Either way, enjoy! I hope you’ll share what you think after seeing and/or reading it!
