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Artemis A Novel Andy Weir 9780553448122 Books

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Artemis A Novel Andy Weir 9780553448122 Books

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.


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Artemis A Novel Andy Weir 9780553448122 Books Reviews

Everyone has to make a living somehow. Even on the moon.

Jazz Bashara grew up in Artemis, the moon's only human colony. Tourists flock there for the chance to spend their life's savings on a guided tour of the lunar surface-- which involves wondering about in a high tech hamster ball-- and sampling the local delicacy known as Gunk, a flavored algae no one voluntarily eats a second time. But for the full time residents, Artemis is a small town with the same problems as any community. It's the kind of place where everyone knows everyone. And everyone knows Jazz Bashara is up to no good.

Jazz has a brilliant mind, but saw more fit to rebel against her traditional Muslim father than to apply it to her future. At 26, she finds herself the lunar equivalent of an errand girl, living in an apartment the literal size of a coffin, and smuggling contraband from earth just to make ends meet. She dreams of the day she'll have a home she can stand up in, and access to non-communal bathroom, but Artemis is expensive. There's a sharp divide between the haves and have-nots those who can afford to have an earth standard of living shipped into city and those at the mercy of the natural restrictions of living on the moon.

So when one of the wealthiest haves, a sketchy businessman who employs Jazz's smuggling skills on the regular, offers her a huge sum to take out a competing business, she takes him up on it. What starts as a complicated, but doable, task quickly spirals out of control. Jazz soon finds herself in the cross hairs of some powerful enemies and discovers Artemis's dirty secrets.

Any expectations I had for this book were purely speculative, because, unlike most of the rest of the world, I have not read The Martian or seen the movie. That said, I was surprised 1/3 of the way through to realize I was reading a lightweight heist novel with some heavy handed commentary on wealth inequality. Yes, it's set on the moon, and the author does not let you forget it, but it's the backdrop to the real issue Jazz needs money.

One of the largest problems of this book is Jazz herself. She's supposed to be a grown woman, but she narrates like a teenage boy. She's as obsessed with her sex life as everyone else in Artemis seems to be, and I have to wonder if author Andy Weir has ever met a woman before. She's also really chatty and familiar with the audience in a way that grates over time

"Getting the contraband to Artemis... well, that's another story. More on that later."

"Okay, you can stop pretending you know what a niqab is."

The whole book has a very YA vibe to it. It's lightweight and the heist gets a bit ridiculous. I mean, they plan out every detail on an ipad-like device that their enemies have proven to be able to hack, but I digress. Between chapters, we get letters between Jazz and her earth penpal that date back to when they are children, but this has little relevance to the story at large and often feels like filler. And we get moments that read like a bad cable movie

"He's right, Dad. I am an jerk. But Artemis needs a jerk right now and I got drafted."

Artemis has it's moments. It's fast paced and often fun. The descriptions of the moon colony, and what life might be like were anyone to attempt settling it, are interesting. But if you're expecting anything more of this than a forgettable caper tale, you might be disappointed.
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.
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.