Artemis

Artemis is the 2017 follow-up to The Martian, written by Andy Weir. Here Weir attempts to replicate the success of The Martian in a sophomore effort. Weir is already a writing superstar as The Martian sold 5 million copies fast even before the movie came out in 2015. Weir has a background in computer science, even working the infamous Warcraft II game with Blizzard back in the day, pretty rad. Because of his computer skills its easy to see where Weir gets his technical and scientific expertise, which is where the genius in this novel lies. 

Artemis follows the life and struggle of smuggler, porter Jasmine Bashar, Jazz for short. She's a twenty-something Saudi Arabian woman, who if not for the fact that she reads Saudi blogs, could happen to be any race. She lives in the space the size of a closet, shares communal baths, and eats algae with no extra flavors. She's po. Her dream is to become a tourist guide and make big bucks so she can live a great life. Oh, and all of this takes place on a colony on the moon called Artemis. Jazz gets involved with some criminals on the colony when she's offered a million slugs to sabotage some resource harvesters.

The book is told from the first person, from Jazz's perspective. This is interesting because the last novel I read (Circe, check out the review here) was also told from the first person. Seems like there might be a trend for novels in the first person that I wasn't aware of, the more you know. Jazz is an sweary, original, protagonist and narrator but the other characters are sort of generic. Good guys that help Jazz. Bad guys that want to hurt Jazz. The brainy tech ally. The millionaire ally. The muscle. Etc, etc.

When it comes to dialogue the book is simplistic. I'm not sure if Weir really knows what twenty-year old women really think, how they think, let alone what they think of sex and their bodies. Although these aspects are disappointing there is one saving grace-science and detailed explanations of action scenes. 

Artemis shines in explaining things. Particularly geeky things that I will never, ever hear about again. In that sense the book is a great once-in-a-lifetime affair. Things like how to get into a vacuum-sealed double hull from the outside get thoroughly explained. 

The science gets hammered in more and more towards the end with "little lectures on why the spaces between the inner and outer hull of Artemis’s domes are pressurised at 20.4 kPa, 10% less than the pressure inside the dome itself, or laboriously listing all the MacGuffin’s technical specifications (“I checked the core’s index of refraction: it’s 1.458, a little higher than fibre optics usually are, but only by a tiny bit … a typical attenuation for a high-end cable is around 0.4 decibels per kilometre … the precision of my OLTS is 0.001 decibels per kilometre." (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/15/artemis-andy-weir-review-the-martian)

Some people might not like all this laborious scientific explanation but for me that is the charm of the novel. The dialogue and characters needed more work but these scientific freakouts are what made the writing interesting. A great comment I saw written about the book in a review is that its like a juvenile Heinlein sort of thing. If Heinlein is mentioned in a review about your book, then you know you've done something right.

However, the science doesn't make everything else good. After finishing the novel (I listened to it in audiobook form, narrated by Rosario Dawson) I had a great feeling of satisfaction, from listening to eight discs' worth of narration and finishing a new science fiction novel. However, the plot to Artemis isn't something I'm going to think about two months, two years, or two dozen years from now. Its okay, and that's fine.