Artemis - Andy Weir

Another hotly-anticipated book this season, Artemis is Andy Weir's follow-up (though not a sequel, not even related) to his smash hit The Martian.  This is still a sci-fi, with the setting being the town of Artemis on the moon, made up of a series of domes and some subterranean levels.  The main character is Jazz, a woman who was born in Saudi Arabia but emigrated to Artemis with her father when she was six and so considers herself a true Artemisian, especially because people can't actually have children on Artemis and have to go to earth to do it because of how the lunar gravity can affect gestation.  Jazz works as a porter, delivering packages, and also as a smuggler--also delivering packages.  And when one of her clients offers her a million dollars (essentially; that's not the currency used, but it's the gist) to destroy some machinery used by a smelting company, Jazz sees her chance to claw her way up out of poverty and into the good life.  Unfortunately, it goes wrong, and she quickly finds herself running for her life and entangled in a plot that could lead to Artemis' downfall.

I don't think this was as strong a book as The Martian was.  First, I'm not convinced that Weir can write a female main character, at least not from a first-person perspective.  Have you ever read or watched something and had a definitive moment where you went, "This was written by a man?"  I had one of those moments here, just a few pages in, when Jazz/Weir describes Artemis as looking not like a group of domes, but a group of boobs.  This is not the type of thing that I have ever encountered in a woman's writing, though it seems to abound in men's writing for some reason.  In fact, with the fact that Jazz does not have a scientific background and Mark Watney of The Martian does, they are essentially the same person.  Their speech is the same, their humor is the same, I basically could not tell the difference between them.  Weir also seems to use Jazz's non-scientific background as an excuse to skimp on some logic in the book; there's still a demonstration of research into various things like welding, smelting, chemical reactions, etc. but he breezes right by some of the things that really would have been built into an enclosed community literally connected to a smelting facility via air tubes.  Let me put it this way: when you have a character spout off all the things that should have been included at the end of the book to foil your big plot, then you probably should have thought the plot out a bit more carefully.

Artemis was a promising setting for a story like this, and I was also psyched to meet Jazz's Kenyan pen pal, Kelvin, who is featured in letters from Jazz's childhood up through the present that appear between some chapters of the book.  But we never actually meet Kelvin, Jazz continues to be annoying, and all of the supporting characters are completely one-dimensional.  There's a romance that's absolutely forced in between Jazz and a supporting character, but while I think we're supposed to get the vibe that "OMG I've loved him all along and I've just realized it!!!" it really just feels like she decides to hook up with this guy because he has a nice bed and a shower and she wants that life.

Overall, super disappointed in this.  1.5 stars out of 5, a huge comedown from The Martian.