In the summer of 2016 I watched The Martian obsessively for a week, and then I read the book. I personally believe it is one of the greatest stories ever told. Not ever written, or ever filmed, mind you - but the story of a solitude more complete than ever in human history, on another planet, in a hostile but strangely indifferent environment, a man keeping alive through sheer force of intelligence, mental resilience, and the knowledge of all the ages before him... I think that's pretty great.
I then got a wild hair to rewrite the book in my own image. Not for publishing, obviously, I'm not an idiot. Just for myself. As a writer, I wanted more from the book. I saw where perhaps some deeper reflection or more finely-tuned emotional resonance was lacking, and I wanted to add it. Just for myself. To make something perfect. Something both scientifically marvelous and humanly devastating and edifying.
Anyway, I gave up about a hundred pages in. It was a rough year otherwise so the project was bound to fall away. But I enjoyed it. And I wrote a few excerpts that I'm really proud of. I will share one here.
As part of the mental toll that daily survival and isolation began to take on the main character, I wanted to show what wild fantasies might spring up in so singular a situation. It wasn't Earthly survival; it was "if I mess up I will no longer be able to breathe." It wasn't Earthly solitude, it was "no one else in the universe sees these constellations." He begins to dream of monstrous Martian inhabitants who keep a constant watch, and who draw ever closer with each dream, the astral embodiment of his relationship with death as it becomes likelier with each passing day. How might Mark Watney cope? What might keep him from going insane? Perhaps, nothing less than transcendence.
***
The dream again. This time they breached the Hab.
They tore through the canvas with a hunger no longer contained, pulling themselves toward my bunk with long grasping fingers, thin bodies vibrating with the looming satiation of the need to consume. I watched them lurch onto the covers, sheets squeezed in translucent fists, and I heard their painful airless gasps of realization that the human flesh they so long desired was not there. I watched from outside.
Because I was freed, finally, from the pathetic constraints of air and hunger and time; I was formless above the Hab while the creatures whirled about in confusion, unable to see or sense my new phase, unable to understand that I was now part of the very planet that had spit them forth in the relentless cold of those long-ago millennia. Every molecule formed my thoughts and my thoughts formed every molecule; I understood at last that the universe was alive and listening and remembering and speaking back, and I was deliriously joined to its infinitude.
Even now as I type this the night is still black and I still feel the irreversible change. I feel the sand in my skin; the rocks are my bones; my blood is a river of stars. Too long in the void, too long under the foreign sky, and the red planet has absorbed me at last. And I am cosmic. I am beautiful. I can never go home. I am become Mars.
