📚 On Potatoes, Colonizing Mars, & Human Heroism

A review of the book The Martian by Andy Weir

Over the holiday season — which extends well into January due to a slew of birthdays — I read a lot of thought-provoking fiction, none of it new, much of it recommended by readers on my birthday post at the beginning of the holiday season. A great many people recommended Andy Weir’s The Martian, which I had somehow mixed up in my head with Interstellar, which I discounted because I didn’t like the previews.

In any event, my friends and readers, you did not steer me wrong. The Martian was a great book — although I actually liked Weir’s other book, Project Hail Mary, a bit more. I haven’t read Artemis yet, but it’s certainly on the list.

Smarter people than I have written in-depth reviews of why the Martian is an awesome book. The more I learn about myself, the more I learn that “in depth reviews” aren’t really my jam — I tend to fixate on a particular big takeaway and I would rather talk about the thing(s) that excited me than write a report summarizing the book and a recommendation rating. I don’t want to write a book report, the way I did for Tamed: Ten Species that Changed Our World. I’m not here to convince you to go buy it (although if you want to, here’s an amazon affiliate link, why not), the way I think everyone who enjoys epic fantasy should check out the criminally underrated Miles Cameron — he’s way better than George R. R. Martin and the series I like best (the Traitor Son Cycle, which I gushed about back in 2021) has the benefit of being finished.

ChatGPT can summarize and recommend well enough, these days. Especially since The Martian isn’t a new book. Hell, they turned it into a movie.

What I want to talk about is potatoes. And the fundamentally human habit of risking many lives — and many resources — to save one lost member of the team. And colonization of Mars, though that’s not really what the book was about.

Science Fiction Captures our Imagination

But to briefly summarize why many people like The Martian, it is very “hard” on the hardness scale of science fiction, which is to say that the author did his best to make all the science plausible. To summarize what a great many reviews point out — the science, particularly the storms that represent the plot’s inciting incident, doesn’t quite work. That said — unlike some of my friends and colleagues — I don’t particularly care about the underlying physics of a sci-fi novel any more than I really care about the cleverness of a fantasy world’s magic system. A Brandon Sanderson fan, I am not.

The thing that makes sci-fi “sci-fi” to me is not how accurate the science is but rather how the plot is focused. The internet is full of definitions like “science fiction is about speculating on what the future could be like, but fantasy is impossible mythologizing” which makes me wonder if the authors of those statements have cracked open a science fiction book since the death of Asimov. Modesitt’s Recluse series has more hard science (entropy, in particular, plays a bit part) in it than Star Wars and don’t get me started on “science fantasy” or the differences between “high fantasy” and “low fantasy.”

But I digress.

My go-to example is “paranormal romance” vs. “urban fantasy.” Taken linearly they are generally about the same things; the mysteries are very similar, and so are the magic systems and the world. But a paranormal romance is first and foremost a romance, and most urban fantasy is first and foremost a detective story.

Science fiction focuses on the science. It showcases science. It sparks enthusiasm in readers about science. Despite the controversy, there are reasons that companies like Raytheon tend to sponsor science fiction conventions.

Science fiction usually has, at its heart, a thought experiment about the future. Something kind of what if about meeting aliens, or figuring out interstellar trade, or what disasters we need to guard against as a race in terms of immortality or technologically-driven inequality.

The Martian writes to the heart of the goal that has captured the imaginations of our elite — colonizing Mars, which to my mind is a hedge against making sure that one astrological catastrophe can’t wipe out our entire species.

Why Mars Matters

I didn’t really go into the book knowing anything about Mars. I know it’s the 4th planet, I know it’s got red dust, I know Elon Musk wants to colonize it — that’s honestly about it. So I didn't care that the dust storm at the beginning of the book — the one that kicks off the whole plot — is completely implausible.

Not as impossible as stuff like the green martians of John Carter’s Barsoom, or the fundamentally silly-but-fun book in which Heinlein’s protagonists explore the world as myth and visit Barsoom and Oz in a spaceship¹ — but unlikely².

Mars captured the imagination of the classic science fiction writers. In addition to The Number of the Beast, Heinlein had the fairly forgettable Podkayne of Mars, the (in my opinion) fairly terrible Stranger in a Strange Land. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells featured Martians, and was adapted into a famous radio broadcast and several movies, including the one by Tom Cruise — which I saw but barely remember. The Mars colony plays an important role in the Expanse, as well, although despite their popularity, I did not really enjoy either the book or the TV show.

But now Elon Musk wants to colonize it for real, and I don’t blame him.

Colonization has a lot of weight in our society. But for all the guilt that comes from the imperialist era, and all the anguish over the environment and the need to protect it, I am not anti-human the way some people are. I don’t have that in me. I want humanity to flourish, I am glad our species left Africa, spread to Polynesia, sent chickens to Peru, etc.

I am not glad at the loss of biodiversity but even that is selfish; I want sustainability because I want humanity to survive, I do not want another Bronze Age collapse. The loss of carrying capacity that followed the collapse of Rome (which as Bret Devereaux points out is “an incredibly bloodless way to describe a period of real, sharp human misery.”) terrifies me. I see echoes of it in the way the Houthis are currently interfering with trade routes in the Red Sea, and it concerns me more than much, much larger wars because we seem to be quietly ignoring it.

For all of Rome’s many faults, losing the Pax Romana was bad, y’all. Losing the Pax Americana, well. It worries me.

Colonizing Mars, however, is inspiring.

Some might say we should look to our own world before leaving it, but to me that’s a bit like saying I should get my car into perfect shape before worrying about my husband’s car needing an oil change. It’s good to hedge, and it’s good to have ambitious goals.

The best book along these lines I’ve ever read, by the way, is Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, which is crazy complex and hard to follow and I’m not particularly fond of the ending, but Ada is a scholar of Byzantium and it shows in her writing. Every word is agonized over and it contains layers I can only barely begin to appreciate. To narrow in on one small element, the people who are trying to get humanity off of Earth so we don’t have all our eggs in one basket deeply care about every life on their side. They absolutely will not allow even the slightest hint of risk when traveling by air, to great inconvenience and expense, but are also dedicating everything about their lives and culture to getting humans into space. It’s really quite beautiful, and in a way alien. Mostly because I suspect that if this sort of philosophy were enacted in real life it would look more like the dystopian reality of modern shipbuilding³.

Nonetheless, Too Like the Lightning and the subsequent books represent a brilliant treatment of a possible near-future Earth that has given a voice to dolphins and octopi, envisions completely private faith and gender relationships, and does some really fascinating things with the concept of godhood.

But I digress; I was supposed to be talking about The Martian. It’s a much more straightforward book, much smaller in scope, but they both get at certain fundamentals of human nature in a way that I personally appreciate.

Leave No Man Behind

I will offer one spoiler for The Martian; the most emotionally impactful moment of the book for me was when a bunch of people got together and risked their lives — to say nothing of spending a bunch of money — to rescue one guy they’d thought was dead.

It’s practically cliche at this point that if a hiker gets lost in the woods, a soldier gets trapped behind enemy lines, a sailor gets lost at sea — or a bunch of kids get trapped in a cave, to reference Elon Musk in a rather more negative light — somebody will mount a rescue party.

The thing that makes humans function as a species is, in my opinion, that we help each other out, even when we don’t even necessarily like one another (but especially when we do). I talked about this more in my article about excellence vs. egalitarianism in human societies, but having a safety net to catch you if you fail is critical for being willing to take risks — the cooperation between resource hunters, the willingness (nay, obligation!) to share, is what has allowed humanity to gather enough resources to fuel our big brains, build our complex cities, and indeed dream of putting members of our species on other planets.

Cold-eyed utilitarian analyses of how many human qalys any particular act generate rarely go deep enough to capture the value that simply being part of a group that will go all-out to save one of its number can provide to the group. Although there is of course debate about whether the group matters more than the individual, I think that framing it as a dichotomy and focusing on the tension between those two things is a fundamentally mistaken way of thinking about the world.

The Potatoes, Tho!

Ok, ok. Another spoiler. Potatoes end up being important, and being excited about potatoes is the real reason I actually sat down to write this review. The above is philosophical reflection I don’t usually engage with because I don’t want to be some lady on the internet telling you how to think. I mostly want to share neat nerdy things, like how one of the obscure reasons that potatoes make an awesome crop for peasants is that because it is a tuber — with the important part underground — it could survive being trampled by invading armies. For this reason, every war between the Seven Years War to WWII led to more potato fields being planted. They're also relatively easy to hide from tax collectors.

I am just Irish enough — nah, let’s be real, just American enough — to have a bit of an unholy fascination with potatoes. I’m online enough to have heard of the potato diet — my boss is an even bigger potato fan than I am — but I am not badass enough to actually do it while also getting food on the table a toddler and preschooler (and husband) are willing to eat. I’ve written entire articles about potatoes, including this fascinating Andean myth about the discovery of potatoes.

Every time the potatoes got mentioned I sat up and took notice, vibrating with intensity about every decision. Knowing about Incan chuño — which is to say, the freeze dried potatoes the Andean peasants used to pay their taxes with — made me ache for more details about the method Mark Watney used to freeze his in the Martian atmosphere.

Chuño looks sort of like a jelly donut but is basically a potato that's been freeze-dried over the course of many nights and a lot of work: it's left out to freeze (repeatedly), then washed in a cold river, then stomped on (in nets) to get rid of the skins, and then left in the sun to dry. Nothing like that ever happens in the book and I found myself a little bummed, although I don’t think it was unrealistic; the environment of Mars is not exactly identical to the Andes.

The part that really got to me was the peas.

Reading along while the protagonist grew potatoes in the Martian environment was interesting to me — which is to say triggered my urge to rant — because he was a botanist and only grew potatoes — not the peas he had. As far as I was able to tell, the peas were only mentioned once in the book, a quick aside:

I searched through the food supplies and found all sorts of things that I can plant. Peas, for instance. Plenty of beans, too. I also found several potatoes. If any of them can still germinate after their ordeal, that’ll be great. With a nearly infinite supply of vitamins, all I need are calories of any kind to survive.

It honestly felt like a bit of a throwaway line so that Weir could get to the part he cared about: explaining why Mark was in a position to grow potatoes, which are awesome. A one-acre potato farm with one milk cow is enough to feed a family of seven, they are delicious, they are nutritious, they are truly a superfood.

But he also had peas! He makes specific mention of them in a context that implied he’d be able to germinate and grow them if he wanted. And peas are nitrogen fixing and peas make excellent companion crops for potatoes. Like… they literally help potatoes grow better. Peas, like other legumes, have the ability to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form usable by plants, enriching the soil for potatoes. Potatoes have deeper roots than peas, allowing them to access nutrients from different soil depths without competing directly.

And in my experience potatoes are annoying as hell to grow because they’re a) root vegetables and b) literally poisonous if you fuck it up⁴. Although everything I’ve read says that potatoes are among the best crops because they’re so straightforward and have so many nutrients, the protagonist didn’t have to worry about vitamins, just calories. Potatoes are in some ways less annoying to deal with than peas — you don’t have to trellis them or anything — but I do not see any reason for him to have refused to plant peas. He had nothing but time, really, and trellising isn’t that hard.

I didn’t care about the implausibilty of the Martian storms, but man, I really hope somebody knows what I’m missing about the peas vs. potatoes thing.

Further Reading

• For examples of food used as currency in various cultures — other than potatoes — check out my article Food As Currency.

• To learn about what starvation looks like on a mass scale, check out my deep dive into why and how famines happen.

1. Anybody who thinks that fanfiction is not for serious writers has paid attention to neither serious writers nor fanfiction.

2. John Carter of Mars is another example of a popular science fiction book turned into an absolutely godawful movie. I watched it with one of my ex-boyfriends a decade or so ago, and couldn’t believe how bad it was. I say this, to be clear, as someone who unabashedly enjoys B and C movies, and whose top choice of movie tends to be a mindless action flick; I even liked the Fast & Furious movie where they put a racecar into space.

3. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes from The Dawn of Everything: “Security takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there's the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.” The latter type is, I think, more important… but it’s harder to put a number on.

4. Don’t eat the green bits! You really do need to store them in a cool place away from sunlight — I’ve been putting mine in a shoebox which has been going pretty well.