With the rave success of his first book The Martian, Andy Weir steps it up with another space fairing adventure this time set on a futuristic space station on the Moon. Science is none-existent, the plot is contrived and the characters are all clones of Mark Watney. This book was like a car crash, I just couldn’t look away.
Jazz Bashara, a young female courier / smuggler on a Lunar space station is pulled into a sabotage mission to replace the station’s aluminium smelter company with another one. In short, that’s the entire plot. There’s subplots with peodophile ex-boyfriends, lunar mafia operations and bizarre re-usable condoms that go nowhere so they can be ignored for the time being.
Jezz constantly insults the reader to an eye-rolling degree, performs actions and decisions that no sane person would ever agree to and like all other characters is clueless and yet a Mary-Sue, not knowing how to do anything until the plot demands of it. Her age is in question all through the book, as a moody immature teenager while making sexual jokes and references. Not until half way through is her actual age given at 26.
And it would have a wet bar and leather chair and other cool powerful-people stuff.
And a personal assistant. A beefy yet gently guy how called by “boss” all the time. Yeah.
Something I would expect to hear from someone pretending to be 26, not an actual 26 year old.
The world inhabited by Jazz is inconsistent. Chapter 10 states that “Artemis didn’t have a police station” but Chapter 11 describes a character as “an extremely skilled police officer” and Chapter 15 mentions “calling the police” so law and order is up in the air. Performing a crime can have the purpetrator sent to the victim’s country which makes no sense when there are multiple victims. There’s casinos, brothels and “lots of prostitution” which makes the whole place the lawless wild west…on the moon.
The Martian was lauded for scientific accuracy and attention to detail, and although there’s snippets of science in Artemis there’s one key point that stuck out.
So Artemis’s air is pure oxygen … It not a new concept – it goes back to the Apollo days.
True it does go back to the Apollo days, it also contributed to a raging fire that obliterated Apollo 1 and it’s crew. The single mixture was primarily due to time constraints and since the Apollo program ended, all shuttles have launched with 60:40 Nitrogen:Oxygen mixture.
In terms of the writing style, the author only uses two utilities to provide exposition. One, ask the reader a rhetorical question and answer it immediately after. And two, use (lots) (of) (parenthesis). Both fine in moderation but it quickly becomes lazy. Speaking of lazy, the number of times a character “says” something (he said, she said etc) clocks in at 599. As a comparison, the book Red Rising by Pierce Brown the count comes in at 53 with 1.5 times the number of pages (I only picked this book as it was at hand, they don’t compare in any other way).
The dialogue is poor to say the least. At three points do three different characters say the phrase “super-duper”, characters that are meant to be responsible adults capable of living on the moon. There’s an entire speech after the heist wherein one character asks a series of rhetorical questions clearly outlining the plot holes, none of which are answered or plugged up.
The book comes to a climax when Jazz sabotages the station’s only source of oxygen, the nearby aluminum smelter. This causes the pumping of lethal levels of chloroform into the station, with the potential to kill all on board. This may carry serious consequences on Earth, but in the wild west of Artemis Jazz suffers not at all and is promoted to master smuggler.
The combination of poor writing, poor dialogue and poor worldbuilding doesn’t leave much to say good things about. I’d recommend it if you were looking for an example of how not to write a book.