Quote:
Originally Posted by latepaul
... I'd like to have seen more colours of emotion than that - he never seem to get down or despondent.
Tension ramped up toward the end though which was fun.
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You should read the Ars interview mentioned in this thread. Weir admitted that he flat-out disregarded the crushing depression that would inevitably set in, and wrote Watney as an impossibly upbeat individual (with a pointer to the Aquaman joke).
I work in the space business, and I didn't even have to suspend disbelief about Watney's attitude, having met people like Don Pettit. On his first mission to ISS, Don spent a holiday (I can't recall if it was Easter or Mother's Day) trying to revive a "dead" payload that I was supporting (a freezer). He got it up and running, just long enough to make an ice cube (in a lattice of his own invention that got the water to stay in place by surface tension), and then it died forever. He was cheerful throughout, even after the final failure.
The real-world Mark Watney is Don Pettit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Pettit