Opera and adventure in Space

I was surprised how much I liked The Martian. I thought it would be harder to follow. I read the novel Dune in middle school and I guess I thought it would be like that.  But I couldn't have been more wrong.  The Martian is super easy to follow and the character was really relatable.  It's a very different kind of scifi novel.  I wasn't surprised that it was compared to other land survive novels. It seems scifi has this thing with taking other genre and putting them in SPACE.  Space Opera, Space Adventure, Space western.  You can being a lot of neat things to an old genre by place in a new place..like Space.