Artemis

Let’s pretend for a moment that Weir didn’t write The Martian. Comparing any book against that juggernaut would result in disappointment. That being said, Artemis is a fabulous story. The first half of the novel felt like a lot of set up, having to explain how the community on the moon works, what the culture is, who the main characters are. I have to say that I didn’t particularly care for Jazz in the beginning. She is gruff, prickly and self-destructive. Understanding her motivations and her backstory helped to balance this, but I didn’t immediately click with her.
The second half of the book clipped along at a great pace. I found myself invested in the characters, almost rushing through the chapters to find out what was going to happen. So imaginative, but realistic at the same time! Really worth the read, even if you can’t help but compare it to The Martian. I am going to have to read this again, slowing it down so I can enjoy the ride all over again!

The book moved along quickly for the most part but the story was highly predictable around every turn. The concept of a city on the moon is really interesting. Main character was not very deep.

Given the monumental success that was The Martian, I almost feel bad for Andy Weir (almost). No matter how acclaimed Artemis turns out to be, readers are going to compare it to The Martian. And unfortunately, many will tarnish their experience by doing so. Artemis is a structural shift from what made Weir famous, and I applaud him for taking the risk.

That said, Artemis continues to employ Weir’s enduring strength as an author. In short, this is a writer who can make hard science fiction funny. And not just nerdy, need-a-degree-to-understand funny, I mean thoughtful and accessibly funny. As with The Martian, many passages made me pause for laughing breaks.

Unlike Mark Watney’s sharp wit and cool demeanor, Jazz Bashara is a comically flawed protagonist. Her exploits inside the Artemis Moon colony have the reader bouncing between cautious admiration and sheer WTF. She’s a classic “unused potential” character, wielding a snarky attitude under an umbrella of bad life decisions. In short, she’s endlessly relatable.

I thoroughly enjoyed Artemis and praise Weir for another enjoyable sci-fi romp (heavy on the sci). As with The Martian, I laughed a lot, learned a lot, and look forward to a kick-ass movie.

I pre-ordered this audiobook and I was not disappointed by Andy Weir’s sophomore work one bit. I loved the moon city of Artemis. It was perfectly described to the point that I could see everything in my head. I loved Jazz Bishara to pieces. She was a much better fleshed out character than Mark Watney and I identified with her right away. This story had everything I loved: science fiction, a mystery, and a heist. I love a good heist! To top it all off, Rosario Dawson was the perfect narrator. Her delivery was so great and she nailed all the sarcastic bits. She should really do more audiobooks. She has the perfect voice for them.

Rated:
Mature Audiences!
Action type violence – not too intense
Strong language throughout: constant F-bombs because of main character’s personal vocabulary
Sex – no actual sex acts, but plenty of references and innuendo

I didn’t realize the main character, Jazz, was female until I’d read several pages. She’s scrappy, brilliant (she can do complicated math in her head), and a self-proclaimed under-achiever who lives in a crummy part of the only city on the moon. Her lifestyle revolves around her smuggling operation and visits to the local bar until she’s presented with a money-making scheme she cannot turn down. From there the plot unfolds as more and more well-laid plans go awry.
Until I was about 2/3 through the book, I was thinking that I’d give the book about 4 stars. In my opinion, it kind of plodded, and I was tired of the foul language. Then things picked up enhanced by Jazz’s own brand of ethics and morality.

One liners and Jazz’s humor save the story during the slower parts and add all the needed spice as well as emotional release as tension rises.

The complicated relationship between Jazz and her father was well-written and believable.
I failed to understand why so many people liked or trusted Jazz and were loyal to her, although by the end of the story I understood most of them.

Good book recommend
Like others, I’ll conclude with the warning that this is not like The Martian with the exception of the attention to the details of the technology needed to live anywhere but earth.

It takes a certain kind of audiobook to keep me alert on a long road trip; for me, it is usually an action-packed, plot-driven thriller. While Artemis isn’t exactly action-packed, there is some great and very original action. The plot moved at a brisk pace and was unpredictable enough to keep me wide awake. The characters were well developed, likable, and didn’t fit into neat little stereotypes. Extra points to Weir for diversity; the main character is a Muslim woman, and Artemis is populated with a pretty diverse cast of characters.

Just like in The Martian, there is plenty of arm-chair science peppered throughout the book, all of it easy to swallow. Artemis is a colony on the moon and the world building around that was great. Weir presents a very vivid and believable vision of the future, and I loved that it wasn’t burdened with an abundance of flashy, high-tech gizmos.

The narration, by Rosario Dawson, was fabulous. A good narrator can make or break a book and Dawson really delivered on this one. All in all, this is a solidly good book.

Thanks to NetGalley and to Penguin Random House UK, Ebury Publishing for providing me an ARC copy of this book that I freely chose to review.
I read Weir’s The Martian shortly after its publication (I discovered it through NetGalley. Many thanks again), before it became a movie, and loved it. Although I regularly recommend books to people I know, this must be one of the recent books I’ve recommended to more people. (In case you want to check my review, I published it on Lit World Interviews and you can check it here). Because of that, when I saw the ARC of the author’s new book was available on NetGalley, I requested it. A few days later I also received an e-mail from the publishers (well, their PR company) offering me a copy as I’d reviewed The Martian. Good minds think alike and all that. I read the book a while before its publication but I don’t expect there would be major changes with the final version.
So, how is the book? Well, I loved it. There aren’t that many books that make me laugh out loud, but this one did. Is it as good as The Martian? That’s a difficult question to answer. It is not as unique. It is very different, although in many ways it’s quite similar too. I suspect if you didn’t like The Martian you will probably not like this one either. The story is a first-person narration from the point of view of a young woman, Jazz Bashara. She lives in Artemis, the first city in the Moon, and has lived there since she was six years old (children are not allowed in the Moon until they are a certain age, although that had increased by the time of the story, so she’s probably one of the few people who has been there almost from birth, as most are immigrants from Earth). Nationality is a bit of an interesting concept in this novel (people are from wherever place on Earth they come from, but once in Artemis, they are in a Kenyan colony… I won’t explain the details, but the story of how that came to pass ends up being quite important to the plot), as are laws, work, money, economy, food… Based on that, Jazz is from Saudi Arabia, although she impersonates women from other nationalities through the book (even in the Moon, otherness unifies people, it seems). Like its predecessor, the story is full of technical details of how things work (or not) and how different they are from Earth. Jazz is a quirky character, foul-mouthed at times, strangely conversant with American pop culture, including TV series, music, etc., extremely intelligent, and like Mark in the first novel, somebody who does not express her emotions easily (she even admits that at some point in the novel). She also has a fantastic sense of humour, is witty, self-deprecating at times, one of the boys, and does not tolerate fools gladly. She is a petty criminal and will do anything to get money (and she’s very specific about the amount she requires), although we learn what she needs the money for later on (and yes, it does humanize her character). Her schemes for getting rich quick end up getting her into real trouble (she acknowledges she made some very bad decisions as a teenager, and things haven’t changed that much, whatever she might think) and eventually she realises that there are things we cannot do alone. Although she does commit crimes, she has a code of conduct, does not condone or commit violence (unless she has to defend herself), and she can be generous to a fault at times. On the other hand, she is stubborn, petulant, anti-authority, confrontational, and impulsive.
There is a cast of secondary characters that are interesting in their own right, although we don’t get to know them in depth and most are types we can connect easily with as they are very recognisable. (Psychology and complexity of characters is not the main attribute of the book). Most of Jazz’s friends are male (so are some of her enemies), and we have a geeky-inventor type who is clumsy with women (although based on the information we are given, Jazz is not great with men either), a gay friend who stole her boyfriend, a bartender always after creating cheap versions of spirits, a rich tycoon determined to get into business on the Moon, no matter what methods he has to use, and her father, a devoted Muslim who is both proud of his daughter and appalled by her in equal measure.
The plot is a caper/heist story, that has nothing to envy Ocean’s Eleven although it has the added complication of having to adapt to conditions on the Moon. Although there is a fair amount of technical explanation, I didn’t find it boring or complicated (and yes, sometimes you can guess what’s going to go wrong before it happens), although when I checked the reviews, some people felt that it slowed the story down. For me, the story flows well and it is quick-paced, although there are slower moments and others when we are running against the clock. As I’m not an expert on the subject of life on the Moon, I can’t comment on how accurate some of the situations are. Yes, there has to be a certain suspension of disbelief, more than in The Martian because here we have many characters and many more things that can go wrong (the character does not fight against nature and her own mistakes here. She also has human adversaries to contend with), but we should not forget that it is a work of fiction. Some of the reviews say there are better and more realistic novels about the Moon. As I’m not a big reader on the subject, I can’t comment, although I can easily believe that.
The other main criticism of the novel is Jazz’s character. Quite a few reviewers comment that she is not a credible woman, and her language, her behaviour, and her mannerisms are not those of a real woman. I mentioned before that she is ‘one of the boys’ or ‘one of the lads’. She seems to have mostly male friends, although she does deal with men and women in the book, not making much of a distinction between them. For me, Jazz’s character is consistent in with that of a woman who has grown up among men (she was brought up by her father and her mother is not around), who feels more comfortable with them, and who goes out of her way to fit in and not call attention to her gender by her behaviour and/ or speech. She is also somebody who has not been encouraged to be openly demonstrative or to share her feelings, and although she is our narrator, she does not talk a lot about herself (something that was also a characteristic of the Martian, where we did not learn much about Mark himself). In Artemis, apart from the first person narration, there are fragments that share e-mails between Jazz and a pen (e-mail) friend from Earth. Those interim chapters help us learn a bit more (however fragmented) about Jazz’s background; they also give us a sense of how things are on Earth, and, although it is not evident at the beginning, fill us into some of the information the narration has not provided us. Although she is not the most typical female character I’ve ever read, she is a fun woman and it’s very easy to root for her (even if sometimes you want to slap her). She does act very young at times, and hers is a strange mixture of street-wise and at times naïve that some readers will find endearing although it might irritate others. The book’s other female characters are as hard and business-like as the men, and often the most powerful and intelligent characters in the book are female (the ruler of Aramis and the owner of the Aluminium Company are both females, one from Kenia and one a Latino woman). Both seem to be formidable, although nobody is pure as snow in this novel and everybody has some skeletons in their closets. Although gender politics per se are not discussed (Jazz notes physical differences between her and other characters as is relevant to the plot, and makes the odd comment about her own appearance) one gets the sense that in Artemis people are accepted as they are and they are more concerned about what they can bring to the community than about their gender or ethnicity.
I agree with some of the comments about the dominance of references to American culture and even the language used is sometimes full of American colloquialisms. There is no clear explanation given for that, other than to assume that media and the Internet are still mostly full of content produced in the US, but even mentions of news and feeds about other countries are not elaborated upon.
I highlighted a lot of the book, but I don’t want to test your patience, and as it was an ARC copy, it is possible that there might be some minor changes, so I’d advise you to check a sample of the book to see if you like the tone of the narration. Here are a few examples:
If my neighborhood were wine, connoisseurs would describe it as “shitty, with overtones of failure and poor life decisions.”
My cart is a pain in the ass to control, but it’s good at carrying heavy things. So I decided it was male.
(Only Americans wear Hawaiian shirts on the moon.)
I left without further comment. I didn’t want to spend any more time inside the mind of an economist. It was dark and disturbing.
In summary, a great caper story, with fun characters, not too deep, but with plenty of technical and scientific information to keep your brain going. I’d recommend reading a sample of the novel, because, once again, you’ll either click with the style of the narration and the characters, or you won’t. I did and laughed all the way to the end of the book. And, if you’ve not read The Martian… well, what are you waiting for?

Artemis is a civilization based on the moon. The Kenyan Space Center has created a vacation destination for earth, but it’s very expensive. Jazz and her father immigrated to Artemis in the early years as part of the work force. Jazz is extremely bright with the whole future ahead of her. But with some bad decisions under her belt, Jazz works as a lowly porter, delivering goods and smuggled items throughout Artemis.

One of Jazz’s wealthy clients has a job for her, a dangerous one that could get her deported to Earth if she’s not careful. The cost is one million slugs (Artemis currency). Jazz is low on funds and she immediately accepts. The heist creates even more dangers, and Jazz finds herself mixed up in murder, space dangers, and the mob.

I think I use the word ‘interesting’ too much to describe some of the books I read. But Artemis was an interesting and engaging read. It’s a whole civilization on the moon and the technology and science behind it is in perfect Andy Weir style. Every detail is thought out, the hull of the structures, the way oxygen is produced, space exploration, gravity transportation, it’s all phenomenal.

The beginning started a little slow for me, but as it progressed and I understood Jazz more it began to pick up. Jazz is just your lowly criminal trying to make up for all the mistakes she’s made in the past, but she has a snarky way of doing it.

My issue with Jazz’s character is that she is so smart and brilliant at everything she does. But she doesn’t put it good use to make an honest, reliable living. She relies on illegal smuggling and dangerous tasks.

So with a page-turning heist, government conspiracy, and a family bond Artemis by Andy Weir gets 4 stars.

Very good but The Martian was still my favorite so far.

Weir does not disappoint with this new space adventure. This time we follow Jazz and her hijinks on the moon. Jazz has grown up on the moon and struggles in a futuristic world. Could not put it down. Enjoyed the fun and wit of this moon-based smuggler.