Is he? I don’t recall any comment about that.
I don’t remember that at all.
<shrug> I listened to the audible version. I remember distinctly thinking, “Oh, I didn’t think of a race at all. Didn’t picture him as black.” Since I have ample evidence that my memory isn’t perfect, I could be wrong. But I could have sworn it was the case.
385 pages of gallows humor. My kinda book. Recommended.
A search on the book for “African” found nothing. A search for “black” found 6 results, none of them relating to ethnic background.
Ah, I’ve been trying to find a pdf copy to consult, but no success. There’s a few other words you might try: color, ethnic, negro, race.
I have no memory of any mention of race at all.
I pictured him as Caucasian because he “sounds” like Harry Dresden
Late to the party but I picked this up yesterday — and finished reading it at 4:30 a.m.
I’ll be suffering for the missed sleep later, but it was totally worth. One thought that kept recurring was how much Heinlein would have loved it.
Well he pulls a Heinlein at one point to save himself. I think there are a few other sci fi shoutouts, but can’t remember the details, dammit. And I just put the book down. Maybe I read it too fast.
Wow that was fun!
Explain, please 
Are we spoilering still?
I can’t find it, but isn’t there a chapter where a Heinlein hero (and the girl?) are stranded on the moon in an emergency shelter? They walk themselves to safety by rolling the tent like a human hamster ball. I remember nudity and perhaps talk of dangerous sunburn, the tent being transparent.
Watney uses a similar method to move his separated, sealed airlock tunnel back to the HAB. Although it is not such a cake-walk.
Someone will come along soon to cite the book, chapter and pages where this happens I am sure.
This book won the GoodReadschoice awards for best science fiction novel of 2014. I think it deserved it IMHO.
J.
I just finished this book, and loved every page of it. It had a very ‘Heinlein’ feel to it. In particular, the method of cultivating the soil was described almost exactly the same as in ‘Farmer in the Sky’. Weir has said that the Heinlein Juveniles were his favorite books, and that if he could only take one book on a desert island it would be "Tunnel in the Sky’.
Anyway, great book. Any nits with technical inaccuracy have to be forgiven since it’s one of the most technically accurate SF books I’ve ever read. Weir said he even wrote his own software to calculate the orbital parameters of ships under constant acceleration in order to get it all exactly right. Reminds me of Robert and Ginny Heinlein spending days calculating orbits for his own books.
Reviving this old thread because it is about the book, not the movie or the book’s adaptability.
I just finished it. Loved it in for all of it’s hard sci-fi goodness. Hope the movie works; given the players, there is a possibility!
As for the issue whether Watney is African American, no clue - I don’t recall any indication of race. I noticed, though, that 3 times in the book, he referred to his jury-rigged, kludged-together creations as “ghetto.” I think the rover he built out, and the Hab after he took a chunk of canvas out for the portable bedroom he built, then glued the Hab back together, etc.
I noticed the use of the word enough for it to stick with me when I went and searched for an SDMB thread on the book, found this, and saw the post above. Other than that, I found his tone to be fun and snarky.
Steely-eyed missile man Rich Purnell is black in the film, but Weir did not mention his race in the book, either. The Indian program head at NASA, Kapoor, will also be played by a black actor.
They’re taking over!
I read it. I loved it. There were a few science bits that were questionable, especially the violence of the first storm, but overall it felt genuine. He really did know a lot about his space hardware and systems and stuff.
There was a minor quibble that one mention of the astronaut boots on the space ship being magnetic. Not that they couldn’t be, but current boots aren’t and it really isn’t necessary, and later it isn’t mentioned for the later spacewalk. Would have been better to go with foot restraints, but it didn’t really detract from the story.
A what? How? He needed all the floorspace and more to grow the potatoes.
I also don’t recall any mention of race for the main character. The NASA PR lady is mentioned as being blond, the woman doing the telemetry download and processing is Asian, and the program head is Kapoor, which is an Indian name, but that’s all I recall.
That’s hardly a telling point. “Ghetto” has entered the lexicon as a phrase to mean run down and trashy. So much that an open letter in the local community newspaper from the neighborhood community used it to describe people putting out their large trash items early.
Weir has said he wishes he hadn’t chosen the windstorm, and if he could rewrite it, he’d use an engine test failure instead. Don’t know why that change didn’t get into the film script, though.
It’s a reference to a repeated theme in Weir’s first webcomic, Casey and Andy.
Not in the interviews I’ve watched. In those he said he was well aware that a Mars dust storm will never feel like more than a slight breeze, but he intentionally stretched the truth for dramatic purposes. He initially had an engine failure in its place but went with the (unrealistic) storm as he wanted it to be a “man vs nature” story, rather than “man vs machine”.