Are you kidding? I can't help but picture the MST3K characters ribbing it the whole time.
The main character is a "scientist" who doesn't use a single scientific term, instead using 50s pop-sci-fi style terms like "Oxygenator". I mean, here we have a botanist on Mars who doesn't even know the word "regolith" or understand why you'd have solar panels tilted at a particular angle. But don't worry, the book is full of such award-winning prose as phrases like "My asshole is doing as much to keep me alive as my brain". Seriously, it reads like a 13 year old boy.
But that's minor compared to how on pretty much every page we have Weir demonstrating his complete lack of knowledge of even the most basic aspects of every field of science he covers. Here, let's just pull up a random one:
Not because of the perfect landing, but because he left so much fuel behind. Hundreds of liters of unused Hydrazine. Each molecule of Hydrazine has four hydrogen atoms in it. So each liter of Hydrazine has enough hydrogen for *two* liters of water
High school chemistry, anyone? (Morbo Voice) Stoichiometry Does Not Work That Way! Weir again and again mixes up volume, mass, and moles. (For anyone not seeing it yet: hydrazine is 1,021g/cm^3, hydrogen makes up 12,5% of the mass, or 0,128 g/cm^3; water under STP conditions is 1 g/cm^3 and hydrogen makes up 11% of its mass, or 0,11 g/cm^3. 1 liter of hydrazine gives you 1,16 liters of water under STP conditions, not 2).
Here, let's grab another one of these from just a couple pages earlier:
"Once I get that hooked up to the Hab's power, it'll give me half a liter of liquid CO2 per hour, indefinitely. After 5 days it'll have made 125L of CO2, which will make 125L of O2 after I feed it through the Oxygenator."
Brilliant - not only do we have him once again confusing volume and moles, but we also have "liquid CO2", meaning that for some reason on a planet where a mere shiny bucket will hold frozen CO2 indefinitely, they've decided for no apparent reason to store it as a superfluid in heavy pressurized tanks at dozens to hundreds of atmospheres and elevated temperatures.
Oh, here's a great one: at one point he starts a diary entry by noting that he's now hiding out in a rover because he screwed up and didn't notice that his hydrogen levels in his habitat were climbing and his oxygen levels were dropping over the course of many days until he checked a meter. How much? The hydrogen went up to 64% and the oxygen levels to 9%. Really, the high squeaky voice didn't clue you in? The anoxic unconsciousness didn't clue you in? *Facepalm* Did this guy not get *anyone* to proofread?
The most mind-bogglingly glaringly bad stuff is of course the plants. As we all know, the sun is an incredibly energetic source. Look at the light in your living room for a few seconds. Notice how you're not blind. Now try it with the sun. Yeah, there's a bit of a difference. WIth the sun high overhead on a clear day the ground on Earth receives about 1000 W/m^2 of light energy. Now picture the brightest CFL you can find on the market - maybe one of those giant 40-watters? To match the light output of the noon sun would take 150 to 200 of them per square meter. Even taking into account angles, night, clouds, etc, it's a ton of energy. To grow the couple hundred meters of potatoes to feed a person? Well, you do the math.
So how does our hero plan to grow his plants? Here's Wier's entire justification
Also, the internal lights will provide plenty of 'sunlight''.
That's it. That's his entire justification on how he plans to provide enough light for his potatoes - normal interior lighting powered by a little solar farm on a dusty planet that receives half the light of Earth. Not even normal yields of potatoes, but super yields of potatoes! In regolith that he does nothing to remove the perchlorates or salts from (never mind that he does nothing to shield his electronics in his 100% ventilation-free canister from the humidity which he describes as raining down). And with Weir's humorously bad misunderstanding understanding of gardening we get his interpretation of potato mounding (aka, packing up soil around potatoes once they get to a large enough size to keep them focused on storing starch rather than going to flower):
Also, as their flowering bodies breach the surface, I can replant them deeper, then plant younger plants above them.
You see, the entire part of the potato plant that breaches the surface is merely a "flowering body". You can reuse space just by planting plants successively on top of each other like cordwood! Trust me, I'm a botanist!
Seriously, this thing is MST3K in book form. Hopefully the movie won't be this terrible. Or maybe it'd be best if it was...