As someone who is not particularly science-minded myself, I sometimes find myself steering away from hard sci-fi because I’m worried about not understanding it. My godmother encouraged me to read this book ahead of the movie coming out, and although I was initially a little reluctant, I’m really glad that I did — and that my worries about not being science-y enough to understand the book were unfounded!
This was my first Andy Weir book so I’m not sure how well this conclusion carries across his other works, but at least within this book I felt that although the science was well-founded and seemed realistic enough (to my untrained eye, anyway) it was also explained in such a way that it was easy to understand. I didn’t feel like the explanations went completely over my head — I was able to follow the logic and the explanations and more or less understand why a plan would or wouldn’t work. Maybe this is in part because the narrator is a science teacher and he’s explaining things to people who aren’t scientists themselves… Whatever the reason, it super helped!
Another thing I found interesting was the way that the gaps in the narrator’s memory are slowly filled in over the course of the book. Obviously the stakes for the mission are extremely high, so it’s not possible for him to just sit around waiting to remember things — he has to get to work and then also remember as he goes, which means by the time he finally remembers everything about the events leading to his participation in the mission, we’re already in deep. That was a really effective narrative technique here, in my opinion.
My only mild gripe is with the ending — I honestly, really and truly didn’t think we needed the last chapter… But that’s fully just because of my preference for storytelling, and it did not at all impact my enjoyment of the rest of the book. (Besides, it wasn’t like I HATED the last chapter, I just think it might have been a little more punchy without it!)
Overall, I’m glad I took my godmother’s advice and I think this would be a great hard sci-fi book for someone like me who doesn’t often pursue hard sci-fi out of fear of not understanding.