Artemis Review

Artemis

By Andy Weir

I received a free copy of Artemis from the publisher in exchange for my honest opinion.

The bestselling author of The Martian returns with an irresistible new near-future thriller—a heist story set on the moon

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she’s stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.

Summary from Goodreads.

For Andy Weir’s second book, he had an almost impossible task of living up to his first book ‘The Martian’ (which you can read my review of here). Whilst most people seem to be saying that he has lived up to this standard, I would disagree. Whilst I will try to not compare his second book to his first, I cannot help to see what he got wrong in Artemis that he got oh-so-right in The Martian.

Lets start off with what I enjoyed about Artemis, we have a very realistic moon base. People pay for a 2 week trip to Artemis and do all kinds of crazy stuff there. They can go visit the Apollo 11 landing site amongst other activities. I wish that we had seen more of this tourist side of Artemis though as we follow a porter / part-time smuggler so all we hear is complaints as to why would anyone want to visit the moon anyway. At first I found this only slightly annoying but I could understand where she was coming from as Jazz moved to Artemis when she was 6.

I also enjoyed the writing style. Weir managed to make me interested in what would actually happen if Earth were to colonise the moon. Aside from those though, I found this book quite dull.

My main annoyance was the protagonist, Jazz. Where with Mark Watney in The Martian I care about his journey and was personally invested in trying to get him off Mars (even though I could not), Jazz constantly irritated me and reminded me of who I did not want to end up like. She constantly can up with solutions out of thin-air with no real substance as to how she got to that conclusion.

Whilst their was more that I should have liked that outweighed Jazz’s continual frustration, like how a city on the moon could actually function; the protagonist is what holds the story together and I wish that it had been the moon instead of her. Maybe I just wanted another ‘The Martian’ but Artemis surely was not.

2/5

Have you read Artemis? Do you agree with my review? Let me know your opinion in the comments below!

Check it out on Goodreads here.

Purchase it on Amazon here.

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