This book is kind of like Cast Away, only on Mars and much funnier. Funny books can be tricky because it’s often the case that the more they make you laugh, the less tension exists to push the reader through to the resolution of the plot. There’s another novel, called Off to Be the Wizard, that I recently gave up on for exactly this reason. Even though it was making me laugh more than any piece of fiction I’ve read in quite a while, it was accomplishing that at the expense of trivializing its plot and its characters.

The Martian is able to avoid this problem, and I think that’s because it puts the story first. The laughs come from the protagonist’s believable — and sharp — sense of gallows humor. The comparison I’m making here, by the way, is not exactly fair, because although The Martian can be quite funny, it’s not written primarily for laughs, as is the case with Off to Be The Wizard. The Martian is primarily a novel of human resourcefulness and adaptibility. Second, it is hard science fiction of the most believable kind, filled with facts about astronomy, physics, and botany (yes, on Mars). Funny is perhaps a distant third on the list of things this book is trying to be. But maybe that’s the best way, or at least the safest one, for funny novels to also be good novels. I don’t know.

Anyway, the story is primarily told through the protagonist’s digital journal entries as he tries to survive having been abandoned on Mars. Astronaut Mark Watney communicates with the reader through these journal entries,  and they really are quite effective at making him into a fully-formed character about whose fate the reader will care. We begin to feel a bond with Mark not just as he despairs over his problems or finds creative solutions to those problems, but also as he groans over the limited entertainment available to him (Three’s Company episodes and disco music left behind on another crew member’s personal hard drive), as he finds ways of filling the long hours alone, and as he screws up in ways small and large.

That last thing is important. Mark doesn’t do everything right. After all, he’s a smart guy — an engineer and a botanist — but he’s still human. Watching him make very human mistakes, sometimes simple and sometimes complicated but always life-threatening, can be gut-wrenching at times. It is also a key part of what makes this novel so believable, and so compelling. Often, books about people trying to survive against all odds have to turn to one or more deus ex machinas to keep their protagonists alive. In The Martian, Mark does occasionally get lucky — let’s face it, anyone would have to get pretty lucky to survive something like this — but just as often he encounters unexpected bad luck or falls victim to his own thoughtless or ill-considered actions. Between this and the realistic science the book offers up, complete with detailed explanations of both the problems and their eventual solutions, Weir does a very good job of maintaining the story’s credibility, which itself makes the whole thing more exciting.

The book is not perfect: A number of characters other than Watney populate the novel, both in mission control on earth and in the spaceship that left him for dead on Mars.  Occasionally, narration will shift to their perspectives. This is almost always an unwelcome break, because these characters are uniformly one-dimensional, seemingly drawn to exhibit one characteristic each — practical, rebellious, nerdy, German. In these interruptions, all that carefully cultivated believability falls away and you feel a little like you’re watching a play where the props are made of cardboard and the only purpose of the current scene is to propel the action to the next one. Thankfully, these interludes are always brief, and they at least serve the practical purposes of letting the reader know about the progress of the rescue mission and foreshadowing some of Watney’s impending difficulties.

Overall, these problems don’t lessen what is essentially a very pleasurable read. The Martian is a good book.