Artemis

At heart there's a fun little romp around a hypothetical moon base and a criminal conspiracy. That part is not so bad.My beefs with the novel are threefold:* The author cannot write a convincing woman, at least not from the woman's own perspective. I've never been a woman, but I have been a teenage boy, and I am pretty sure that adult, straight women spend less time thinking about breasts than a teenage boy. The narrator is obsessed.* The libertarian nuttery runs deep in this sucker. Laws against flammable materials are zealously enforced, but pedophilia is perfectly legal, selling drugs to minors is perfectly legal, and unions are basically just thugs who beat you up if you work without the union. (And yet, for some reason, the most skilled workers refuse to join the unions? because it would mean being paid less? who would join a union to make less money?)* Lastly, the economy makes no sense whatsoever. They use a company scrip for currency (in order to evade all the evil banksters on earth!), and the company scrip is "grams safely landed on the moon." Apparently a delivery boy makes 12,000 grams a month. A beer costs about 25 grams. At one point they disclose that a gram is roughly 1/6th of a dollar. Meanwhile, in the real world, it costs about $13 to get a single gram of material into LEO, to say nothing of a transfer to, or soft landing on, the moon. The entire plot hinges on exporting bulk fiberoptic cable from the moon to the earth at a fabulous profit, somehow? I don't know if the author has ever handled fiber optic cabling. It's not lightweight stuff.

Can you give a book 0 stars? I guess not, but oh boy would this book deserve it. Don't typically write reviews, but if this helps one person save their money then I've done good work. Bought this without reading any reviews thinking, "I liked The Martian, how bad could this be!" Oh was I wrong. Andy Weir, this dialogue is bad. Like almost offensively and inexcusably bad.The concept of what life would be like on the first city in the moon is interesting, but that's where the good ideas stop and the bad ideas take over.Do yourself a favor and read some real sci-fi. Not this. Anything but this.

I pre-ordered this as soon as I knew it was being published, all on the strength of The Martian, which I loved. So now I can tell you that Sophomore Slump is a real thing.  Artemis isn't a bad book, it's just not a great book.  I'm not sure it's always a good book, but I'm up and down about that.As I was beginning it, The Housemate read me a highly critical review by the AV Club.  Most of the review was about how the main character didn't feel like a woman. I felt that was relatively unimportant, that gender wasn't an issue in the story as far as I'd read, and honestly I still feel that way.  Weir could have made his protagonist male and changed almost nothing about the narrative. Had this book been about women's issues, I might have felt short-changed, but as it is, this is a pretty standard thriller, and representation is way down on the list of things one expects from this genre.However, irony is ironic. When I picked the book up again after hearing the review, I found that it had been close to being right.  Not spot-on, just close.  None of the characters had any depth for me, mostly they were interchangeable plot devices.  Again, that's standard fare in the genre, so I'm willing to shrug and let it go in spite of the fact that I know Weir can create dimensional characters.  But what flummoxed me was that the action sequences were so dull.  They were highly  technical, and where that worked in The Martian, it does not work here.I found myself racing through those parts to get to the human interactions, which if they didn't have the depth I could have hoped for, were at least more interesting than all the tech stuff. I found myself thinking that someone told Weir that "people loved all that technical stuff in The Martian, so maybe you should do it again, and do more of it." Yeah that worked when it was a single man against the elements and ultimately against technology.  But here?  It's kind of flat. At least that's how it felt to me.So in the end, while I enjoyed parts of it, those parts proved greater than the whole, and I can't be super enthusiastic the way I was about The Martian. That makes me sad.  It doesn't mean I won't read the next thing Andy Weir publishes, but I'm not going to be so quick to pre-order it next time.

It’s difficult to review this book having first read The Martian. For me it’s an impossibly hard act to follow. I struggle to find books that don’t bore me rigid so I ended up reading that twice. It was amazing how it still seemed fresh.I read Artemis last year and I’ve also just read it again. Andy Weir certainly knows how to keep his readers hooked. Other reviewers have stated that he’s trying to tick all the boxes of political correctness. Possibly but I don’t really care - I think Andy writes as if he himself is the central character. In this case here he is playing the part of a younger Saudi Arab female. Does he get it right? Probably not, but it doesn’t really matter. I’ve watched him in interview on YouTube and he’s great fun, and his personality shows in this book.What matters here is the story, and it doesn’t disappoint. It reads at a cracking pace from start to finish, and the reader will get their science fix just like in The Martian... it’s all so believable. The critics should give him a break...he deserves a massive pat on the back for what he’s achieved in such a short time. They even use an edited version of The Martian for science classes in schools.I’m glad he wrote this story and I can’t wait for the film.

Well, I'm 2/3rds of the way through Artemis so far, which means that I don't hate it. That said, I wonder if I'm the wrong audience and this book is intended for the "young adult" market? It's narrated in the first person by a young female character, but the character as written by Wier spends so much time trying to be funny/cutesy/streetwisey that it's difficult to stay with it. If it's meant to be "empowering" for young female readers, I don't think having a middle-aged bloke write it is really the way to go (the phrase "possibly a bit creepy" actually springs to mind). Haven't read anything else by Weir, and I'm now a bit apprehensive.

It's not as good as The Martian. The premise lacks credibility and the main character pursues a course of action for reasons which just don't add up, especially considering the high risks involved. For someone who is supposed to be street smart she is completely naïve when asked to embark on a programme of destruction for the equivalent of a million bucks and doesn't question the motives of the guy who is paying her. The technological side of the story is good, but let down by a weak plot.

I was so looking forward to Andys Weir's second book, as like everyone, I absolutely loved The Martian. Without giving anything away in terms of plot, this is a huge dissapointment for a few reasons. The first reason is that the main character, is,well, not really very nice. You dont warm to the character, and I found a lot of her dialogue, well annoying to be honest. It got to the point that I didnt really care whether she survived or not. Ultimately the whole plot is about her trying to do something illegal to make money which is not something that I particular admire - if the character was cool, and someone you could like then maybe that would be ok, but she is not. Second point, the plot is weak and frankly not very interesting. There are a few characters that develop quite well, but mostly the characters are poorly described and not very interesting. The final thing - for me the Moon is well, a dry, dull not very interesting place. Mars is different. Everyone is excited to imagine what might be there and the challenge of getting there. The moon, we know its just a moon and there is nothing there - I think Andy needs to pick a far more ambitious plot for his book - Interstellar travel, going to Venus, I dont know, just something more interesting than, living on the moon.

I bought this back in August 2018 (it's now September 2020 and I've just read) on the back of Andy Weir's The Martian, which I really enjoyed. Although I've had it in my library for a while, I didn't feel that I wanted to read. Then I just happened to scroll down to my older purchases and thought I would give it a go.The books starts with a couple of people on the moon surface and there appears to be an issue with one of the tanks and they are trying to get back into the Bubble. The EVA Master is ordering the other person to stop and connect his tanks to their suit, but they are adamant they are going to do it their way.What really surprised me, is the protagonist (the other person on the surface) was female. Whether this is unconscious bias or that The Martian was male based, I'm not sure, but probably a bit of both.I loved the character of Jazz, she was sassy, smart and resourceful and is the resident smuggler in Artemis, the only city on the moon. She has been on the Moon since she was 6 years old and really wants to become an EVA Master so she can quickly save up enough money - we only find out what for towards the end of the book.She has a fractious relationship with her father and with the Head of Security at Artemis, Rudy - mainly because he is trying to get her deported back to Earth by getting evidence of her smuggling activities.As Jazz is trying hard to make money, the richest person in town Trond Landvik (Norgegian), who she regularly smuggles for, makes her an offer than she can't refuse - to destroy a business on the Moon so Trond can take over. As Jazz is highly intelligent, she finds a way, to do this, but things really don't go smoothly and she discovers that somebody is now trying to kill her. She has to use her wits and street smarts to say alive.It's a great book and Andy, if you happen to read this, can you do a sequel, Jazz has so much more to offer us. I would love this story to be made into a TV series rather than a film, as you have more time to show character development and build the story.My only regret, is that I left it so long before reading it.