The Martian: Chicago Cubs, Beer, and the G2

The Martian: Chicago Cubs, Beer, and the G2

NASA

A friend once told me that wearing a NASA t-shirt in America marks you as a geek. I'd encountered NASA mainly through movies, but I always harbored a faint fascination with space. I hated math, but I genuinely loved physics and earth science — as much as any science student. As a humanities major I once represented my school at a science competition. I couldn't touch any of the numerical calculations, but for the open-answer questions I drew on everything my imagination had to offer. I even won an award. (A minor one, admittedly.)

That space fascination carried into university. When I was required to take a science elective, I naturally chose the astronomy course. The problem was the professor who taught from a textbook that was thirty years out of date. Oh my. Please — at least show us a NASA movie while you're at it.

After that class, my interest in space went cold. When films like Interstellar came out, I briefly picked up a book on relativity — but with a mind as set as mine, "comprehension" wasn't really on the table, only "acceptance." Still, reading The Martian brought back a flicker of my old curiosity about space and NASA. Honestly, it wasn't the heroic astronauts that got to me — it was the people pulling all-nighters calculating orbital trajectories and staring at ASCII code. The romance of geniuses doing what they love obsessively. Not likely I'd ever join NASA, but might there be a chance to cover it someday?

(p.19)

Eleven days after being stranded on Mars, protagonist Watney writes just a single line in his log: something about the Chicago Cubs. Good grief — the Chicago Cubs. The author must have been on Mars while writing this. At just the right moment... (this is about a week into being left alone) ...that's the line he writes!

We are social animals, and almost none of us would go a week in true isolation. Abroad these days, the first question is always "is there Wi-Fi here?" We couldn't survive a day without the internet. If I were alone on Mars for a week, I'd probably be thinking about family, lovers, survival — but somewhere around day seven I'd start wondering: "I wonder if the Korean Series is going okay."

What a gut-punch of a passage. When fear itself gets boring from isolation, the thought that creeps in might be something like: "I really want to read a webtoon."

(p.82)

Day 80. Watney looks out at Phobos, one of Mars's moons, to get his bearings. In the rusting Martian desert, Phobos serves as a kind of compass. A delightful image — following the finger pointed by the god of fear to find your way.

In extreme situations, the most frightening thing is having no emotion at all — something close to resignation, a hollow helplessness. Any emotion, when it's a real feeling, moves the human spirit — and that spirit moves the body to action. Fear is a vague dread directed at something whose form you can't see. But look it directly in the face, and it's no longer fear. Fear can become the fuel of life. Just as "revenge" can become a reason to live, fear too can become a reason to move.

(p.93)

Day 97. The Pathfinder activates. He wept.

(p.122)

Mission commander Lewis, upon hearing that Watney is alive, couldn't feel happy. She had said, "I left him behind. In that desolate, bleak wasteland that no one can reach." Then the first thing she mentions in her first message to Watney is: beer. What a magnificent invention alcohol is — beer in particular. More than hundreds of words, the last line of that message resonates because it says "beer."

Watney's reply is a masterpiece.

"Commander, this isn't your responsibility — it was just bad luck..... blah blah... But you still owe me a beer."

Beer again. The perfect medium for reconciliation, isn't it? After chicken? Beer. After a basketball game? Beer. Everything leads to beer. I'm not exactly a beer evangelist, but reading that passage made it impossible not to crack open a can.

Beer appears again in the second half. After barely hauling the rover out of a sand trap:

"The Jet Propulsion Laboratory built this rover incredibly tough. When I get back to Earth, I'll have to buy Bruce Ng a beer. Not just Bruce Ng — I should buy everyone at JPL a beer. Actually — when I get back to Earth, I'm buying everyone a beer." (p.249)

Beer! Beer!

Much of the book is complex. I know theoretically that combining hydrogen and oxygen produces water — but it's not something I'd actually do as a chemistry experiment at home. I don't take apart my phone when it breaks to fix it myself. The novel devotes a lot of space to scientific explanation, but it stays accessible. When things get too complicated, the book "cut it short" — very coolly.

(p.126)

Simple. Friendly, and never losing its humor. This is the scene where Watney repairs the water reclaimer. Following instructions to the letter would certainly be correct — but we all know how complicated that can actually be. When every expert knot-tyer in the world can't untangle a knot, the right answer is to cut it with a knife. Balance. The lubrication of "humor" is what solves the tension between technical complexity and communicating with a general audience. Cool. (Let me write my articles like this.)

(p.180)

Throughout the book, there are tributes to duct tape. I can't blame him. Any Korean man who has served in the military — or anyone who has moved apartments a few times — knows the power of gwibin tape (Korean blue tape). Apart from being a bit short, there is no more perfect invention.

That's right. The truly important and useful things in life are the small inventions around us. Without a nail clipper, life would be deeply inconvenient. Without a lighter, every smoker in the world would be shaking. Without duct tape, Watney might never have made it home alive. Covering things with plastic and sealing them with tape — when oxygen was leaking, it wasn't your girlfriend who stopped it. It was the duct tape. Look around you. Be grateful for what's in your pocket.

(p.227)

Loneliness crashes over you all at once. The reason we turn on the TV first when we come home — the reason we crank up the music's volume when we're lonely — is to fill the space of loneliness with sound. Watney's feeling of unease when he steps out of the constant mechanical noise and into silence — and his description of it as "hard to put into words" — comes from the sudden strangeness of a space that has gone empty. The machines, the equipment — they had been filling a kind of absence. Something that kept a vacancy occupied.

(p.250)

I wish I'd read it in English... I wonder what the original says there?

(p.294)

So much of life gets reduced to money. What did it cost, what was the budget, what's the return, what's the expected revenue. But sometimes there are things that can't be reduced to money. I try not to comment on politics, but the Sewol Ferry — it should never have been a question of cost-benefit analysis. This is fiction, but the United States would actually run this kind of rescue operation in real life. Like saving Private Ryan (wrong one, but still) — like saving Watney. Even if it's partly performative, it's the right thing to do. Because it's what exists for the human beings who make up a country, who make money, who cry and laugh and live together.

China may seem far behind, but my read is different. The reason the US calls China G2 is that the US has started taking China seriously. Think about it — even ten years ago, the script would clearly have called for Russia. (Or Japan, if they needed a friendly partner.) But here, China appears. Whether you like it or not, "China" has started to occupy a real space in the American imagination. And in this story, it helps the US.

Of course China has its own calculations. But however you look at it, the US and China cooperating to solve a problem is real. That's also a change. If the previous image of China in American storytelling was "competitor" or "threat," here it appears as "partner." This is what diplomats call a "cooperative competitive relationship" — and this film suggests it's possible.

Of course in reality, the fight over territory, maritime rights, airspace, and now space is fierce. The technology gap is enormous — and yet it can also close in an instant, in this kind of field. What The Martian says is: 1. Hollywood needs to sell this film to China too. 2. The general American perception has started to see China as threatening, but also as a potential partner. I saw the film too, but I won't write a separate film review.