This catalogue archives a “13th printing of the 2015 edition” of Andy Weir’s science-fiction novel, The Martian (“Anonymous”, n.d., Publication: The Martian, https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?754641). The book follows Mark Watney, a botanist and astronaut who is marooned on Mars after his colleagues are forced to evacuate the planet; in the process believing they have left him for dead. Watney, primed with botanical expertise, an unerring will to live and his Rabelaisian humour strives to extend his lifespan on the inhospitable planet until some form of rescue arrives, if any.
This edition is a tie-in with the 2015 Ridley Scott film adaptation of the same name. Unlike other science-fiction texts housed within this collection — see The Lost Worlds of 2001 or Future Noir: the making of Blade Runner — this edition does not purport to elucidate the making of the film itself, rather was released to symbiotically advertise for Scott’s production and garner a larger reading for the original text off of the assumed box office success of the film. Hence, this edition’s cover utilises the disquieted countenance of Matt Damon who depicts Watney in Scott’s own blockbuster re-telling; said cover is accredited to “film artwork © 2015 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation” and Damon’s face is framed by the captions “NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX” and “The Sunday Times Bestseller” (courtesy of www.headdesign.co.uk). “In 2013 20th Century Fox optioned The Martian” in the hopes of adapting it to film; subsequently, tie-in editions of the book were released from 2014 onwards bearing Damon’s visage, reminiscient of a similar cover depicting an anonymous male figure (also produced by one ‘headdesign’) (LoBrutto, 2019, p.194).
The article “Andy Weir’s Best Seller ‘The Martian’ Gets a Classroom-Friendly Makeover” sequences the responses to this edition that emanated chiefly from the educational sector. Teachers, primarily within STEM fields, saw the pedagogic qualities of The Martian’s protagonist's heuristic approach to scientific problem-solving and how, in turn, their students could therefore benefit from engaging with the text if a “cleaned-up edition of the book”, that being the 2014 and 2015 editions respectively, existed (Alter, 2017, p.1). One was promptly released in 2016 by Crown Publishers with the insistence of Weir himself. Hence, the Bill Douglas Museum's variant is a somewhat (but not wholly) uncensored version of the text. However, this is not the only historical change that this artefact 'officially' underwent.
In a paper written to inaugurate their new software ‘Coleto’ — “an automatic collation tool for the comparison of variant texts in English, German, or French” — Erik Ketzan and Christof Schöch used “three versions (or variants) of Andy Weir’s science fiction novel[…](2011, 2014, 2016)” as demo subjects for the software; we must note that the 2014 variant listed is textually identical to the 2015 edition in the Bill Douglas archive but was part of the first batch of releases of that specific edition, whereas the 2011 version was Weir’s self-published edition and the 2016 version is the aforementioned bowdlerized classroom variant (2021, p.1). This bowdlerization was not limited to the classroom edition however, indeed the Bill Douglas’ variant of the text saw distinctive editing of this type, specifically regarding two primary examples of profane locution which had been “substantially reduced, by about 33% and 15%, respectively” (2019, p.15). This reduction in profanity is of extreme, narrative significance and makes the Bill Douglas’ edition of the text distinctly isolable in its characterisation of Watney as the traditionally-heroic protagonist. Such an observation is informed by the findings of Coleto’s collation, which discovered profanity to be statistically deducible as “the most foregrounded stylistic feature in the novel” and therefore of Watney’s internal monologuing (Ketzan, Schöch, 2019, p.17) (Dh-Trier, n.d., https://github.com/dh-trier/coleto).
We must also note that this tie-in edition incorrectly chronologizes the various releases up until its release date, as behind the title page it reads “Originally self-published by Andy Weir in 2013”, which rather reductively negates the 2011 self-published, serialized version of the text alongside the 2012 audiobook (“one of the biggest audiobook hits of all time”) published via Newmarket’s Podium Publishing which all contributed to this edition’s editing and design (“Canadian Publishing 2018: How They Listen Up North”, p.1, 2018).
This elucidates, in part, the importance of archiving and exhibiting this specific literary artefact in a digitized format, as the increased digitalization of book depositories at the turn of the century coalesced with Weir’s authorial pursuits and the text’s original publishing which contributed to the confused chronology of The Martian’s literary history. Hence, such convolution necessitates the exhibition of this text to further clarify Weir’s and the narrative’s writing history. This is hindered by the fact that the novel was originally released for free, in a serialized format, via the author’s blog ‘Galactanet’ but can now only be officially purchased since being published by Random House. The blog itself, which appears extremely dated and rudimentary, does link to the “Hardcover” “Kindle” and “Audiobook” versions of the text (this artefact only being a paperback), but does not specify how to access either the classroom edition or the other variants (“Creative Writings of Andy Weir”. Galactanet.com, 26/3/2016). When considered through the “theoretical lens of historical institutionalism”, the above exampled difficulties further explicate the demonstrable challenges of modern, digital archivism in its moving away from the physicalised spaces of “libraries, museums, and archives” (Blomgren, 2020, p.75).
Therefore, in archiving this 2015 artefact via a cinema museum such as the Bill Douglas or within an Omeka catalogue, one can begin to not only assert the history of the text’s recent production, re-production and context but also commence critiquing the ways in which said history has become disordered; subsequently, one can assume that this is due to a number of factors, but specifically relates to the publisher’s desire to streamline their sales of the text via specific, verifiable channels which, in turn, would necessitate a level of consistency in the text’s writing across the different mediums that ultimately exhibit it for purchase.
This ‘streamlining’ has also led to salient inconsistencies in this artefact’s attribution of work to notable contributors, hence this catalogue has striven to rectify such oversights whilst demonstrating how even texts that see worldwide release and aim to promote a major motion picture are still susceptible (if not more so) to disregarding the contributions of editors or artists alike. An example of this is the uncredited mapped section of Mars which appears “on unnumbered pages [8] and [9]”; according to the ‘Internet: Speculative Fiction Database’, one “Fred Haynes” is credited with the map’s production in the “Broadway Books editions which have the same map” (“Anonymous”, n.d., Publication: The Martian). According to a Washington Post article titled ‘Andy Weir's 'the Martian' Continues Strong at no. 1’, as titularly alluded to, the book not only saw worldwide release and acclaim but fast sales that rocketed it to a bestseller (“Anonymous”, 2015). Therefore, accurate citation and attribution is of even greater significance between all editions; in this particular case it mystifies as to why the text’s chronology and the map’s creator are given such little consideration.
Therefore one could conclude that the motive of this archive, in its collation and cataloguing of all of these tie-in and companion texts, is to further clarify each artefact’s history, accredit each contributor and highlight the difficulties that such digital archivism proposes within mediums like Omeka; “through interfaces and visualizations that reanimate a previously inert collection” but in the same sense, distance their desired audience from an artefact’s inherent tactility (Berry, 2016, p.102).
References
Alter, A. (2017).Andy Weir’s Best Seller ‘The Martian’ Gets a Classroom-Friendly Makeover. New York Times Company.
Anonymous. (2015) Andy Weir's 'The Martian' continues strong at No. 1. WP Company LLC, The Washington Post. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1713719674?parentSessionId=f9lpydECIxuEyfiX1KIf4k2%2FUq4cmHK%2Fr%2B3hgflhPKE%3D&accountid=10792&sourcetype=Blogs,%20Podcasts,%20&%20Websites
Anonymous. (2018) Canadian Publishing 2018: How They Listen Up North. Publishers Weekly,265(38), 80. https://uoelibrary.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/canadian-publishing-2018-how-they-listen-up-north/docview/2104452372/se-2
Anonymous. (n.d.). Publication: The Martian. https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?532295
Clarke, A. C. (1972). The Lost Worlds of 2001. BDCM Entry # 38364
Dh-Trier. (n.d.).GitHub - dh-trier/coleto: Text comparison or collation tool based on Python. GitHub.https://github.com/dh-trier/coleto
Berry, D. M. (2016) The Post-Archival Constellation: The Archive under the Technical Conditions of Computational Media. In Blom, I., Lundemo, T., & Røssaak, E. (Eds.). (2017).Memory in Motion: Archives, Technology and the Social. Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1jd94f0
Blomgren, R. (2020) The Institutions Go Digital. In Audunson, R., Andresen, H., Fagerlid, C., Henningsen, E., Hobohm, H., Jochumsen, H., Larsen, H. & Vold, T. (2020).Libraries, Archives and Museums as Democratic Spaces in a Digital Age. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Saur.https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110636628
Head Design. (n.d.).Head design.https://www.headdesign.co.uk/
Ketzan, E., & Schöch, C. (2021). Classifying and Contextualizing Edits in Variants with Coleto: Three Versions of Andy Weir’s The Martian.Digital Humanities Quarterly,15(4) https://uoelibrary.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/classifying-contextualizing-edits-variants-with/docview/2633784993/se-2
LoBrutto, V. (2019). RED: The Martian. InRidley Scott: A Biography(pp. 194–199). University Press of Kentucky. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvd7w7s1.28
Sammon, P. M. (1996).Future Noir: The making of Blade Runner. BDCM Entry #92770
Scott, R. (2015). The Martian [Film]. 20th Century Fox.
Weir, A. (n.d.).Galactanet. https://galactanet.com/writing.html
Weir, A. (2015). The Martian [Paperback book]. Del Rey (UK). BDCM Entry #92770
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