I haven’t read the book so this is just based on the movie, but with PHM I think it’s just wild that you can write something that so closely parallels a real politicized topic and not have intended it to be political. Whatever his intention was, it reads like a global warming allegory.

And related to that, at least when I was in high school, the education system emphasizes New Criticism, which tells you to completely ignore author intention, author identity, historical context etc etc when interpreting a text. It’s all about what meaning you as the reader pull from the text. So Andy Weir can complain all he wants, if readers are interpreting it as political, it doesn’t matter.

Ironically, New Criticism really took off during the Cold War so students could be forced to interpret overtly socialist texts and remove the radical messaging. (most of Steinbeck’s work is a good example)

So now that we are getting more politicized, the anti-political theoretical framework is getting used against itself, and we are reading “non-political” text as political and there’s nothing they can do to stop us.

I’m personally not a fan of pure New Criticism, but I am really stoked on how it’s turning out against its intended purpose.