If you read Andy Weir's "The Martian" and finished it with that peculiar emptiness left behind by a book that made you laugh, suffer and learn in equal measure, welcome to the club. There are plenty of us. And we've spent years looking for something that gives us the same feeling.
Weir's formula is deceptively simple: an ordinary guy trapped in an impossible situation who solves problems with logic, science and a sense of humour that works like body armour against despair. Mark Watney isn't an action hero; he's an engineer with a blog and a serious wish not to die. That combination —survival + humour + an analytical mind— is addictive.
The trouble is that most of the recommendations you find online are in English. But what about in Spanish? Is there anything that captures that same energy, written from our own sensibility, with our own sense of humour?
Yes. There is. And there's more of it than you might think.
The Weir formula: what exactly we're after
Before making recommendations, it's worth pinning down what makes "The Martian" special. It isn't just survival. There are thousands of survival novels. What Weir did was combine four ingredients that rarely appear together:
A technical protagonist. Not a soldier, not an adventurer. Someone who thinks like an engineer, a programmer, a scientist. Who breaks problems down into pieces and solves them one by one with whatever's to hand.
Humour as a defence mechanism. Not forced humour or gratuitous jokes. The dry, ironic humour that surfaces precisely because the situation is so dreadful that laughing is the only alternative to losing your mind.
Technical credibility. The solutions work. The science is real, or at least plausible. The reader learns things without even noticing.
Page-turning pace. The feeling that every chapter is a problem to solve, a deadline to meet. The tension doesn't come from a villain: it comes from physics, biology or thermodynamics.
Recommendations in Spanish
PIZZA, TWITTER y 23 días en el INFIERNO — José María Palazón Molina
If what hooked you on "The Martian" was an ordinary guy facing nature with an engineer's logic and pitch-black humour, this is probably the Spanish-language novel that comes closest to that experience. Chema is a programmer in his forties stranded in the Namib Desert, documenting his survival with the cynicism of someone who knows that rebooting the router won't work this time. The "programmer's logic" applied to survival is the Spanish equivalent of Watney's "botanist's logic".
Discover the novel →"Los asquerosos" — Santiago Lorenzo
There's no science fiction here, but it has a protagonist who handles survival in an abandoned village with the same obsessive logic as Watney. The humour is sharper, more Spanish, closer to roguish everyday comedy. If Watney grew potatoes with manure, Lorenzo's protagonist rigs up a self-sufficiency system that would make any bushcraft YouTuber weep with envy.
"Project Hail Mary" — Andy Weir (translated)
Yes, recommending Weir himself is cheating, but the Spanish translation of his third novel is excellent and many readers of "The Martian" don't know it exists. Same formula, greater ambition: a science teacher wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of why he's there. The humour is more mature, the science more ambitious, and there's a supporting character who is, quite possibly, the best alien in recent fiction.
BLACKOUT EUROPA — José María Palazón Molina
If what you're after is the technical side of the formula —"solving an impossible problem with engineering and under pressure"— Blackout Europa applies that logic to a continental cyberattack. Elena Vega doesn't grow potatoes; she cracks malicious code with a 48-hour deadline. Less humour, more adrenaline, but the same pleasure of watching a technical mind take on the impossible.
Discover the novel →"Intemperie" — Jesús Carrasco
No humour, no science, but with survival so raw and prose so precise that fans of McCarthy's "The Road" will love it. It's the polar opposite of Weir in tone, but it shares the obsession with the details of daily survival: water, shade, the next step.
Why this formula works so well
I think the success of "The Martian" —and of the novels that share its DNA— comes down to something simple: we love watching clever people solve problems. Not with weapons, not with magic. With their heads.
In a world where the headlines grow more apocalyptic by the day, there's something deeply reassuring about a story that says: yes, everything has gone to hell, but here's someone who sits down, thinks, and finds a solution. Even if the solution is imperfect, even if humour is all they have left, even if the next problem is worse than the last.
That's the promise of these novels: not that everything will turn out fine, but that it's worth trying. With a good joke along the way, preferably.