THE MARTIAN (2015) is one of my favorite movies. Even though it’s romantic nonsense, even though, even though I barely care about a space program, even though Matt Damon. As I write, it’s playing on Netflix, and at this moment I am playing hooky from cutting and sewing my quilt border in order to focus on the ending. Every time his character Mark Watney follows the science, every time he goes to the numbers, I want to cheer and laugh. That determination to find a solution in listing what he has available to work with, to calculate how long till this or that runs out, and every time he recognizes an opportunity, my heart sings. Mark Watney, Space Pirate. “Everywhere I go, I’m the first.”

I was never in love with the space program, not even in those days where we all stayed glued to our televisions to watch the first space flights and the first person on the moon. It seemed to me in my childhood that a lot of money was spent on nothing much when the world population was exploding and people were starving. It was never the allure of space travel or exploration that drew me to science fiction. It was gender equity—a future where gender is something, sure, but not everything. A future where unless you’re hitting on me [too late now] my gender and sexual preferences are about as relevant as my favorite color. [Which is vermilion, by the way.] I wanted to read stories where women were not constantly being sent to help their mothers in the kitchen while their brothers went out and rode horses. [Yeah, I was one of those horsey girls.]

But I am watching The Martian, and I’ll probably watch it again, once it ends. By then I will be sewing. Cutting and sewing. Fandango sends me promos a few times a week. Most of those films open with a battlefield or sex. And yeah, sex is great even when you’re 73, but it occupies a tiny fraction of my life. You know? I’m told some people genuinely do think about sex pretty much all the time, but human beings do a lot of things. We do things in addition to those media favorites of violence and sex. I stare at the sky for more hours in a week than I contemplate sex or even color, and I think about color a lot. I plan meals. I prepare those meals. I create recipes. I contemplate weather. I spend a lot of time worrying, but the sky and food and color are pleasant obsessions. So is sex, but seriously… In real life, The Martian is about the reality I live—survival, food, safety, family, loyalty, compassion, risk. Because of my privileges, I’m not worried about hunger or warfare or sex, because I get two and I’m mostly safe from the third when it’s unwanted, but of those, humanity deliberately created and pursues only twp.

Spare me the films about military strategy. Spare me. Give me love and I can imagine the sex. Most of us can imagine that. The sort of brutality in some video games? That’s not a game I want to play, not even in my imagination. The naked bodies? I already know how to play that one. Show me something more challenging, something I can’t even imagine. Show me how to win peace. Show me how to make the world safer for everyone. Sex is easy; real life is complicated.

[Someone should do a calculation on real live sex as opposed to media sex—and calculate how many films present a proportionate life experience.]

“I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.”

—Mark Watney in The Martian

I will never venture into space. I’d rather a cure for cancer, feeding the hungry, getting people off the street and into housing with health care. Fewer of us, taking care of Earth, finding the truth about love. I want first world people to recognize that all people, everywhere, and throughout time want a meaningful life with food and safety for their children, clean air and a beautiful land all around.

So. Not space so much, but one unknown place that fascinates me is ocean. Maybe that’s because I walk beside it most mornings, I stare and it stares right back at me. The best science fiction about people living in, not on, ocean has been written by Vonda N. McIntyre, who had the biology to make it real. I used to teach her short story, ‘”Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand.” Go look her up, or read those biologically transformative stories in Fireflood and Other Stories, or read her incredible novel Dreamsnake. It’s one of the great ones.

And The Martian is tense in the last fifteen minutes. You know it’s going to be okay, and that real life is not like that. Real life steals victory, or what feels like victory, because there is always something else coming along.

“Do the math.”