Profanity is a key stylistic feature of The Martian, as exemplified by the novel’s opening lines in M1 and M2: “I’m pretty much fucked. That’s my considered opinion. Fucked.” Profanity may be the most important stylistic feature in the textual history of The Martian, as the raison d'être for an entire variant, M3, the “Classroom Edition,” was to remove the novel’s copious profanity for educational audiences. Profanity is also a touchstone for issues of censorship and commercialization in discourse around the film adaptation of The Martian. While the film only explicitly includes two verbal instances of fuck, the offending word is also written on screen and alluded to a number of other times, as Jacob Brogan writes: “[fuck is] often suggested in the way that sex might be in a different sort of all-ages movie.” [Brogan 2015]. Brogan reads The Martian film’s limited use of fuck as a metafictional device, the film “pointedly nodding to its own limitations [... and] making reference to one of the most bizarre guidelines of the MPAA’s PG-13 rating, the principle that a film can include only one, and in some very rare cases two, (non-sexual) uses of the word.” Brogan also suggests Watney’s frequent use of fuck is emblematic of the character’s psychology: “Indeed, Watney’s access to the one thing he’s not supposed to say — and his willingness to keep saying it — indexes his indomitability.” As another impression, The Martian foregrounds the use of conversational American English to render almost all of its narrative, a tone underscored by its frequent profanity. An improved formal understanding of profanity in The Martian texts could thus support a variety of research questions.

While locating profanity in texts is a matter of simple query, Coleto’s generated tables bring additional speed and convenience to comparing the profanity in M2 and M3 (Table 3), while the generated visualizations provide additional context (Figure 6).

Note that the y-axis is much smaller here than in Figure 5, as the edit from Martian2 to Martian3 (removing and replacing profanity) was much smaller than the edit from Martian1 to Martian2. The large spike around sentence 3600 in Figure 6 demonstrates how Coleto highlights areas of large edits which scholars may wish to investigate further. In this case, however, the explanation is mundane: small textual variation surrounding a particularly long string of code that NASA sends to Watney on Mars.

Manually reviewing the separated edits in Coleto’s generated .tsv table reveals that over 290 of the edits to Martian3 remove or soften profanity, depending on how “profanity” is defined,[9] in ways presumably acceptable to school boards: fuck → crap, ass → butt, piss → pee, shit → crap, etc. As some examples beyond corporeal profanity, “Jesus Christ” is changed to a secular “Wow,” “Thank God” is removed, and a line involving the epithet gay is also altered:

In Martian3, “Gay probe” is altered to “Pride parade probe.” These changes to Martian3 were previously noted by Susan Ohanian (2016), who criticized the spirit of the edit and noted inconsistencies, such as another instance of Jesus Christ that remains in the text [Ohanian 2016].

None of the bowdlerization in Martian3 is surprising, as the express purpose of the text was to remove or reduce profanity and other potentially offensive content. But we wished to also know whether Martian3 altered any text besides potentially offensive content — perhaps Weir or his editors used the occasion of a new edition to make some final corrections? — and the table generated by Coleto can quickly answer this question, as well. By manual inspection and sifting of the dataframe, it emerges that Martian3 also makes factual corrections to scientific details, as well as occasional replacement of continuous verbs and other minor stylistic features (Table 4).

By separating and classifying edits, Coleto can also serve as an exploratory research tool by assisting in the spotting of non-obvious trends. For instance, manually inspecting the data table of changes from the earlier Martian1 to Martian2, we stumbled upon the discovery that profanity was cut in this first edit, as well. This was a surprise, given the large frequency and foregroundedness of profanity in Martian2. It emerges that in the first edit of The Martian, from self-published novel to major publishing house release, fuck and shit (and their word forms) were substantially reduced, by about 33% and 15%, respectively. Numerous other words and phrases were also softened with “lesser” profanity, more varied profanity, or non-profanity (e.g. “the shit hits the fan” → “all hell breaks loose”) in the first edit.

The Martian thus has the dubious distinction of having been bowdlerized three times: in M2, which reduced profanity significantly, the thorough scrubbing of profanity in M3, the “Classroom Edition,” and finally in the film adaptation, which abided by a (reported) film board’s code of two fucks allowed, but winked at the audience through additional implied profanity. This textual history should inform readings of profanity in any variant or adaptation of The Martian, and perhaps any discussion of the protagonist Mark Watney’s nonconformist characterization.

When comparing variants manually, or even with existing collation tools, it can be difficult to gain a sense of the frequency and distribution of edits, especially very minor stylistic edits. For instance, in the first edit of The Martian, it is readily apparent that numerous minor stylistic/orthographic changes have been made to the way scientific abbreviations and numbers are written, such as L → liter and 8 → eight, but existing variant analysis tools provide no simple way to quantify these and gain a sense of this type of edit’s distribution.

From the script-identifiable edits of The Martian, Coleto classifies 868 edits as the rendering of numbers and scientific values in the first edit, from M1 to M2. While individual instances of such numerical changes may seem interpretively insignificant, hundreds of them scattered across the text have a cumulative effect upon readings of the text. In protagonist Mark Watney’s narration in Martian1, the use of cardinal numbers and short scientific abbreviations support the fiction that Watney is a scientist working in dangerous conditions, too focused on surviving the life-threatening conditions on Mars to bother writing “kilometers” or “forty-one” out in full. Plausibility is a central concern of science fiction [Stockwell 2000], and when such abbreviations and numerals are expanded in Martian2, this may increase readability, but weakens the stylistic realism of Watney’s voice.

In Martian1, however, Weir did not only write L for liter or 8 for eight in the voice of astronaut Mark Watney, but also in the third-person narration of the NASA scientists back on Earth, which has a jarring effect on readability (Table 5):

In addition to plausibility, scientific rigor is another central concern of science fiction [Stockwell 2000, 78], especially the subgenre of “hard science fiction,” and Weir pays careful attention to the accuracy of scientific and mathematical explanations throughout The Martian. Weir went as far as to code a computer program that plotted the trajectory of the fictional Hermes spacecraft to ensure scientific accuracy in The Martian. Weir’s dedication to scientific accuracy was so great that a NASA scientist later reviewed Weir’s trajectory calculations, and concluded that Weir had gotten them right [Burke 2015].

In the process of writing and publishing Martian1 online, readers occasionally pointed out corrections to mathematics and science presented in the novel, which Weir then incorporated [Dickerson 2015]. While locating these scientific corrections in the variants of The Martian would certainly be possible manually, it would be a time-consuming task of scanning the text for single-character changes to numerical digits. The side-by-side data table generated by Coleto, however, greatly speeds up this manual search (Table 6).

The most substantial spike in Coleto’s visualization of edits between M1 and M2 in Figure 5, above, occurs at the very end of the novel: the removal of the 263-word epilogue at the end of Martian1 and a 255-word addition at the end of Martian2, which substantially alters the novel’s closure. In both M1 and M2, Watney, finally safely aboard the rescue spacecraft, is happy to be alive and states, “This is the happiest day of my life.” In Martian1, however, a brief epilogue follows this. Some time after his rescue in space, Watney, now safely back on Earth, is employed by NASA to train the crew of an upcoming space mission. Watney sits upon a bench, killing time, when a young boy recognizes him as the famous astronaut. Watney tolerates the boy’s attention, until the boy poses a question:

“So Mr. Watney,” the boy said, “If you could go to Mars again, like, if there was another mission and they wanted you to go, would you go?”

Watney scowled at him. “You out of your fucking mind?”

“Ok time to go,” the mom said, quickly herding the boy away. They receded in to [sic] the crowded sidewalk.

Watney snorted in their direction. Then he closed his eyes and felt the sun on his face. It was a nice, boring afternoon.

[Martian1, 331–32]

This is a typical epilogue in fiction, as defined by the Russian Formalist Boris Eikhenbaum: it sets the perspective by a shift in time and provides some sort of after-history of the major characters [Torgovnick 1981, 11]. This epilogue of M1 may be read to evince the lack of internal growth by Watney, who remains emotionally disengaged and contemptuous of playing the role of hero. Watney’s harrowing adventures on Mars have not altered his nonconformist characterization, a nonconformity encapsulated throughout the text by — and on the final page of the novel, reiterated by — the most foregrounded stylistic feature in the novel: profanity. The epilogue of M1 also shuts the door on potential sequels, which could be read as authorial and textual nonconformity with commercial expectations for science fiction novels.

Martian2, however, cuts this pessimistic epilogue and inserts a substantial amount of optimistic text just before the novel’s end. In M2’s new ending, Watney expresses gracious appreciation for all the parties involved in his rescue — his crewmates, NASA, the Chinese space program, the billions of people who hoped for his survival — and affirms a widespread faith in human nature:

The cost for my survival must have been hundreds of millions of dollars. All to save one dorky botanist. Why bother?

Well, okay. I know the answer to that. Part of it might be what I represent: progress, science, and the interplanetary future we’ve dreamed of for centuries. But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.

[Martian2, 368–69]

This greatly alters the tone of the novel’s ending, revises Watney’s growth and characterization, and now leaves open the possibility of sequels. The correlation between reduced profanity in M2 and Watney’s character is notable: as the text itself becomes more conformist, so does its protagonist.