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This leaves the Martian sequences free to introduce and explore Mark’s predicaments and the solutions he devises to them. The first one (and one of the two really major conflicts) involves sustenance. Given the time it would take for a rescue mission to reach him, he does not have enough food to survive. The solution he comes up with - take advantage of a nearly-unlimited supply of multivitamin supplements, break up the NASA meal rations over an extended period of time to obtain the requisite protein, and farm potatoes for the remaining daily caloric needs - is neatly laid out within the first page of the book’s third chapter (roughly 18 pages into a 370-page book). Therefore, most of the conflict involves implementation and workflow rather than discovery.

To avoid this coming off like the science lecture it otherwise would be, Weir employs the storytelling technique of describing the situation and character detail in the context of ongoing incident. This is a utilitarian approach to world building, but an effective one, and Weir also uses it to introduce us to the narrator’s sense of humor. Being free of the need to create tension from the events themselves, Mark uses the log entries to give us inflection and tone.

There are three instances within the novel where the author steps outside of everyone’s point of view and assumes omniscience. These instances are explicitly there to set up an imminent event, and they create a different and more unpredictable species of tension from the kind we encounter during the NASA and Hermes passages. It’s appropriate, then, that the developments led up to during these parts are the most immediately disruptive to the story.

The first of these is easily the most explosive (no pun intended), involving a lengthy description of the manufacturing process for the Habitat canvas, and a frightening scenario under which a component of that canvas can malfunction undetected over time; the other two scenarios catalog similar sequences of events involving a rocket filled with food and supplies and a long, sloping entryway into a critical basin on the surface of Mars.

The Martian is one of a very short list of fiction novels that create an accessible representation of an event cascade, which is a term generally used in the programming world to represent a series of developments caused by an initially innocuous action (in the programming sense, an example would be a mouse click or keyboard stroke). In very basic terms, an event cascade is described as one action directly causing another, which directly and/or indirectly causes another or more actions. The Martian uses the concept of the event cascade to fill the void where an antagonist’s actions would be in a traditional story. It’s a heady chance to take, because event cascades are only innately exciting or suspenseful if the author is unusually good at setting up conflict and consequentiality in a very short and unfussy way, unless the reader comes to the table with an existing interest in the subject.

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