REVIEW

Review - Artemis, Andy Weir

Reviewed By
Andrea Thompson

Dang. We all really wanted to love this book after the monster science hug that THE MARTIAN unexpectedly gave us a few years back.  The geek science is still there to be enjoyed - detailed and highly credible, and you never have cause to doubt the intelligence and passion of author Andy Weir here in his field of interest. 

We see again some toasty dry humour, but without that sense of impeding peril ARTEMIS struggles to engage us in the fate of its lead, petty criminal Jazz Bashara.

Jazz isn't hideously unlikeable, but other than being rather admirably tenacious, she's not that likeable either.  She's sketched a little too thin and the reader really needed for her to have a better sense of purpose in order to have a vested interest in her fate.  Jazz's intentions  didn't have be that noble, but considering the out-of-world setting, they could have been a lot more perilous and suspenseful.  There are parts where Jazz is required to look outside of the personal ramifications to herself and think instead of the safety of others living at Artemis, but these scenarios just seem just inclusions to move the technical narrative along.  Also, the danger to others is a consequence of Jazz's own actions on the whole anyway.

In the keen hands of Andy Weir, ARTEMIS gives us great insights to what practical challenges there might be to our future living outside of our own planet.  It will happen some day on a larger scale of course, and Artemis is a living breathing city with all the usual challenges and petty concerns that would be scaled up to large potential disasters in a hostile 'off earth' environment.

As with THE MARTIAN, the strength of the writing lies in the imagining of the environment and the ever present threat to human life via any one of many small mistakes that could be made.  The people depicted as living here in Artemis are mostly self serving, and there isn't the 'brave new world' community identity.  It is on the whole every woman for herself.  (Or man, etc).

ARTEMIS satisfies the space/science fan in all of us but needed  better characterization and an a keener editorial eye cast over where all of the 'wacky races' shenanigans were going to end up.  Too many broad brush strokes are made at the novel's conclusion to tidy it all up when it would have been just as okay to go a little dark, rather than feature film fodder light.

Looking forward to anything more that Weir can bring by way of a space action novel with less goof and more attention paid to what possible uniquely frightening space catastrophes could await us out there as we further explore and populate planets and moons other than our own.

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