Throughout his novel, The Martian, Andy Weir has his main character, Mark Watney, measuring time in all different kinds of ways. The reader experiences Mark telling him in number of potato crops, kilometers he can travel, light-seconds of distance, and amount of food or water or oxygen he has left. Most notably, as he is stranded on Mars, Watney measures the passage of days in sols, because the number of hours of daylight and darkness are different than they are on Earth. Watney explains this early on, and it soon becomes a detail that, for many readers, fades into the background as they become accustomed to hearing Mark’s days described in terms of sols. It is not until the reader gets a view of how Mindy Park’s life has changed that we really feel the difference between sols and days. Mindy must translate the time stamps on the images she views to local time, and her watching Watney’s movements becomes so vital to the mission that she must change her lifestyle to fit his.
Mindy trudged to her computer. Today’s shift began at 2:10pm. Her schedule matched Watney’s every day. She slept when he slept. Watney simply slept at night on Mars, while Mindy had to drift forty minutes forward every day, taping aluminum foil to her windows to get any sleep at all. (297)
This passage is significant because it shows the dissonance between how the reader experiences time when Watney is narrating versus how the reader experiences time when somebody on Earth is narrating. Though there are occasions when events seem to be happening almost simultaneously, the fact that Mindy must take steps to replicate Watney’s environment (making it dark when it’s daytime) shows how time is moving differently on the two separate planets. Even as Hermes moves closer to rescuing Watney, and everybody on Earth is metaphorically leaning closer and closer to Mars as the critical mission is undertaken, Mars and Earth are still essentially occupying two different time zones. This becomes a critical barrier when those on Earth know that Watney is about to head into a sand storm but they cannot inform him, and instead must just pray that he will realize it before it is too late. In fact, there is nobody who is on Watney’s timezone, even when communication is established, and he has to deal with a 14 minute transmission delay. The closest he gets is when he is able to communicate with Hermes, when Johanssen informs him “we’re only 35 light-seconds apart, so we can talk in near-real time” (336). This confuses the reader's experience of time, because Hermes is still far enough away from Mars at this point that Watney has not even begun his journey to where he will be picked up, but their distance is described in light-seconds which cut the transmission time, making it seem as though they are close enough proximally to be able to speak to each other in real time.
So the reader is left trying to reconcile many different time zones and time measurements, making it difficult to discern how much Earth time, Mars time, and Hermes time is passing in between the Earth chapters, Hermes chapters, flashback chapters, and the chapters from Watney’s sol logs. Each of these different locations measure time in different ways because different things are important, for example, Watney measuring time in food because he needs to survive. These time zones are all co-existing, but not on the same timeline. Earth has information about a dust storm that is upcoming, while Watney gets this information well into the storm. Watney knows he is alive before anybody on Earth does. Those aboard Hermes know that Mark is safe before those on Earth do. The time zones overlap with different transmission delays, which the reader themself feels switching between the chapters. All of these different time zones are finally brought together following the climax of the novel. During the rescue, every second is stretched so that the reader experiences it painfully slowly. This process increases the tension and suspense that the reader feels, as the astronauts must time their rescue of Watney down to the final 11 seconds that the crew has to get Watney into Hermes before he is no longer reachable. In normal life, 11 seconds would feel like nothing, and in fact we do not generally notice the passage of 11 seconds, or even a full minute, unless we are anticipating something. The anticipation seems to slow down the time, (a watched pot never boils), and this is something that Weir relies heavily on for the last section of the novel. When Watney quips to Beck “give me a minute” (365) something that we say constantly without really thinking about it, Beck replies “We don't have a minute...we have eleven seconds before we run out of tether” (365). This pulls the reader into focus: what exactly is a second? And how much happens that we don’t realize or perceive in 11 seconds?
Following these tense 11 seconds, Mark’s first log is marked “Day 687” (367) and this seems to be when it actually sets in for Mark that he is no longer on Mars “Oh my god. I’m really not on Mars anymore” (367). By having Mark switch to days instead of sols when he gets off Mars, Weir is finally ensuring the reader’s hope that has been kindled all through the nobel, that Mark is alive and with other human beings heading home. The fact that Mark officially switches to measuring time in days shows his transition from living his life by the Martian day and night hours to his transition back to living on Earth time. This transition reverberates back to Earth, where Mindy can stop taping foil over her windows and start experiencing time like a normal human being again. The way we measure time is clearly a very important motif in Weir’s novel, because the different measurements of time show the different ways that the characters experience the same events in different spaces and time zones. These measurements can even be linked to emotional realization, such as the switch from sols to days being linked to hope and the hint of a future for Mark.
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