Review: Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for an honest review,

Andy Weir, a Campbell Award winner in 2016, had researched his first book, The Martian, starting back in 2009, then released it chapter-by-chapter on his website for free, compiled the story into a Kindle edition for $0.99, rose to the top echelon of Amazon's sci-fi bestsellers, after which the book was picked up by Crown Publishing in 2014. Presumably, some editorial polishing occurred. The book shined, hit the bestseller lists, became an Audie Award-winning audiobook, and was adapted into a film with Matt Damon. I’m sure that the pressure to live up to those results in a follow-up novel was and is immense. So I’m sad to say that I am sorely disappointed in reading Weir’s new outing, Artemis.

The exact cocktail that makes a book about a man struggling to survive as the sole occupant on Mars involved bravado, bluster, humor, 80’s music, geekery and hard science. Weir’s use of these things in The Martian paid off, as did the tight plot, time pressure, and focus on survival. Mark Watney’s characteristics do not, however, drape handily into a barely female character like Jazz Bashara. Her character in this book is a thinly built, wise-cracking criminal with boobs (pretty much Weir’s own words), and the story of her criminal activities and gambit to survive their consequences is not well developed and isn't compelling. I was put off early in the book by the fact that Jazz appears to have been initially developed as a gender-neutral or possibly male skeleton character who was later given breasts to make her female, a female birth name (Jasmine), a nationality (Saudi) and religion (Muslim, but just barely). There is nothing about this character that reads as female. (This is, by the way, stuff that currently makes female writers and readers rail vehemently.) We never find anything of depth or empathy in this character and her story. She is immature, risk-taking, shallow, and has few if any real friends, other than her pen pal. She is 26 years old, a criminal, unobservant, and even ignorant of important facts. For instance, if you are a smuggler operating in the equivalent of a small, enclosed city, it would behoove you to know about the major crime syndicate operating in your community, what they own, who works for them, and how to stay out of their way, assuming that’s even possible with a major crime syndicate. Jazz, we are led to believe by the end of the book, runs the sole smuggling operation on the Moon, working with the assistance a childhood pen pal employed back at the Kenya Space Corporation. The mob has no interest in getting a take of her profits evidently. (Because crime syndicates aren't interested in smuggling, natch.) She singlehandedly keeps the street drugs and guns out of Artemis, and the mob is just fine with that. The mob has a sole enforcer living in the Artemis base and even he doesn't have a gun. The enforcer and Jazz mostly stay out of each other's way until they don't. Jazz's biggest fear is getting deported back to the earth. Not because she's a Saudi woman who would have to live a more restricted life there if she remained in Saudi Arabia with family, which she seems likely to have to do if she's deported without assets, but merely because she has been raised since age six in a low gravity environment and will have to take treatments to build bone density and muscle mass. No consideration to her culture and potential social circumstances is given, presumably because that's just too complex. Jazz is supposed to be so smart and has so much potential. Where is the evidence of that in her actions and choices?

So much of the plot is implausible, and then we have the style in which this book is written. That old saw about writing- don’t tell me, show me- is ignored with an extensive epistolary element with her penpal Kelvin, which lazily explains the backstory of Jazz’s relationships (with Sean, with Tyler, and oh by the way, now she’s a slut because she has post-break-up sex with other men), and the founding of her/their smuggling operation. We never meet Kelvin, her partner at KSC, who sends up the goods she wants to smuggle into Artemis on the weekly shipments that leave the KSC launch site for Artemis.

Rooting for a blustery Mark Watney to survive and safely return home from Mars was something that engaged the reader, and in the story itself, an entire planet. Rooting for a blustering, liminal female criminal saboteur, who ignorantly gets caught up in a mob operation, is pretty hard to do. We could call it an anti-hero story, but honestly, with stretches of awkwardly written science separating complicated EVA action, and with hardly any real character development, it is difficult to engage the reader enough to make fine distinctions. I stuck it out to finish this book, but a planned buddy read of it was canceled to preserve the well-being of my blogging buddy.

A disappointing read.



View all my reviews