Artemis: A Novel by Andy Weir (Epub)

Description

Not crazy, eccentric-billionaire rich, like many of the visitors to her hometown of Artemis, humanity’s first and only lunar colony. Just rich enough to move out of her coffin-sized apartment and eat something better than flavored algae. Rich enough to pay off a debt she’s owed for a long time.

So when a chance at a huge score finally comes her way, Jazz can’t say no. Sure, it requires her to graduate from small-time smuggler to full-on criminal mastermind. And it calls for a particular combination of cunning, technical skills, and large explosions—not to mention sheer brazen swagger. But Jazz has never run into a challenge her intellect can’t handle, and she figures she’s got the ‘swagger’ part down.

The trouble is, engineering the perfect crime is just the start of Jazz’s problems. Because her little heist is about to land her in the middle of a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself.

Trapped between competing forces, pursued by a killer and the law alike, even Jazz has to admit she’s in way over her head. She’ll have to hatch a truly spectacular scheme to have a chance at staying alive and saving her city.

Jazz is no hero, but she is a very good criminal.

That’ll have to do.

Propelled by its heroine’s wisecracking voice, set in a city that’s at once stunningly imagined and intimately familiar, and brimming over with clever problem-solving and heist-y fun, Artemis is another irresistible brew of science, suspense, and humor from #1 bestselling author Andy Weir.

User’s Reviews

Review Praise for Artemis:“An action-packed techno-thriller of the first order…the perfect vehicle for humans who want to escape, if only for a time, the severe gravity of planet earth. The pages fly by.”—USA Today “Revitalizes the Lunar-colony scenario, with the author’s characteristic blend of engineering know-how and survival suspense…Jazz is a great heroine, tough with a soft core, crooked with inner honesty.”—Wall Street Journal “Smart and sharp…Weir has done it again [with] a sci-fi crowd pleaser made for the big screen.”—Salon.com “Makes cutting-edge science sexy and relevant…Weir has created a realistic and fascinating future society, and every detail feels authentic and scientifically sound.” —Associated Press “Out-of-this-world storytelling.”—Houston Chronicle “Weir excels when it comes to geeky references, snarky humour and scenes of ingenious scientific problem-solving.” —Financial Times “Weir has done the impossible—he’s topped The Martian with a sci-fi-noir-thriller set in a city on the moon. What more do you want from life? Go read it!”– Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter “Everything you could hope for in a follow-up to The Martian: another smart, fun, fast-paced adventure that you won’t be able to put down.” – Ernest Cline, New York Times bestselling author of Ready Player One “A superior near-future thriller…with a healthy dose of humor.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “An exciting, whip-smart, funny thrill-ride…one of the best science fiction novels of the year.” —Booklist (starred review) “Narrated by a kick-ass leading lady, this thriller has it all – a smart plot, laugh-out-loud funny moments, and really cool science.” —Library Journal (starred review) Praise for The Martian: “Brilliant…a celebration of human ingenuity [and] the purest example of real-science sci-fi for many years.” —Wall Street Journal “A gripping survival story.” —New York Times “Terrific…a crackling good read.”—USA Today “A marvel…Robinson Crusoe in a space suit.”—Washington Post “Impressively geeky…the technical details keep the story relentlessly precise and the suspense ramped up.” —Entertainment Weekly “A story for readers who enjoy thrillers, science fiction, non-fiction, or flat-out adventure.” —Associated Press “Utterly nail-baiting and memorable.”—Financial Times “A hugely entertaining novel that reads like a rocket ship afire.”—Chicago Tribune

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ At heart there’s a fun little romp around a hypothetical moon base and a criminal conspiracy. That part is not so bad.My beefs with the novel are threefold:* The author cannot write a convincing woman, at least not from the woman’s own perspective. I’ve never been a woman, but I have been a teenage boy, and I am pretty sure that adult, straight women spend less time thinking about breasts than a teenage boy. The narrator is obsessed.* The libertarian nuttery runs deep in this sucker. Laws against flammable materials are zealously enforced, but pedophilia is perfectly legal, selling drugs to minors is perfectly legal, and unions are basically just thugs who beat you up if you work without the union. (And yet, for some reason, the most skilled workers refuse to join the unions? because it would mean being paid less? who would join a union to make less money?)* Lastly, the economy makes no sense whatsoever. They use a company scrip for currency (in order to evade all the evil banksters on earth!), and the company scrip is “grams safely landed on the moon.” Apparently a delivery boy makes 12,000 grams a month. A beer costs about 25 grams. At one point they disclose that a gram is roughly 1/6th of a dollar. Meanwhile, in the real world, it costs about $13 to get a single gram of material into LEO, to say nothing of a transfer to, or soft landing on, the moon. The entire plot hinges on exporting bulk fiberoptic cable from the moon to the earth at a fabulous profit, somehow? I don’t know if the author has ever handled fiber optic cabling. It’s not lightweight stuff.

⭐ Can you give a book 0 stars? I guess not, but oh boy would this book deserve it. Don’t typically write reviews, but if this helps one person save their money then I’ve done good work. Bought this without reading any reviews thinking, “I liked The Martian, how bad could this be!” Oh was I wrong. Andy Weir, this dialogue is bad. Like almost offensively and inexcusably bad.The concept of what life would be like on the first city in the moon is interesting, but that’s where the good ideas stop and the bad ideas take over.Do yourself a favor and read some real sci-fi. Not this. Anything but this.

⭐ I pre-ordered this as soon as I knew it was being published, all on the strength of The Martian, which I loved. So now I can tell you that Sophomore Slump is a real thing. Artemis isn’t a bad book, it’s just not a great book. I’m not sure it’s always a good book, but I’m up and down about that.As I was beginning it, The Housemate read me a highly critical review by the AV Club. Most of the review was about how the main character didn’t feel like a woman. I felt that was relatively unimportant, that gender wasn’t an issue in the story as far as I’d read, and honestly I still feel that way. Weir could have made his protagonist male and changed almost nothing about the narrative. Had this book been about women’s issues, I might have felt short-changed, but as it is, this is a pretty standard thriller, and representation is way down on the list of things one expects from this genre.However, irony is ironic. When I picked the book up again after hearing the review, I found that it had been close to being right. Not spot-on, just close. None of the characters had any depth for me, mostly they were interchangeable plot devices. Again, that’s standard fare in the genre, so I’m willing to shrug and let it go in spite of the fact that I know Weir can create dimensional characters. But what flummoxed me was that the action sequences were so dull. They were highly technical, and where that worked in The Martian, it does not work here.I found myself racing through those parts to get to the human interactions, which if they didn’t have the depth I could have hoped for, were at least more interesting than all the tech stuff. I found myself thinking that someone told Weir that “people loved all that technical stuff in The Martian, so maybe you should do it again, and do more of it.” Yeah that worked when it was a single man against the elements and ultimately against technology. But here? It’s kind of flat. At least that’s how it felt to me.So in the end, while I enjoyed parts of it, those parts proved greater than the whole, and I can’t be super enthusiastic the way I was about The Martian. That makes me sad. It doesn’t mean I won’t read the next thing Andy Weir publishes, but I’m not going to be so quick to pre-order it next time.

⭐ If this book were a TV show, it’d be “Two Broke Girls” (look it up).I’m giving it 2 stars because the story was interesting and it was a really quick read; however, the main character was incredibly annoying. The character might appeal to those who find humor in crass behavior and language and the kind of antics on those practical joke shows or the movie “Jackass”, but I didn’t find it the least bit funny or appealing. It’s written in first person narrative, and that’s OK, but there was a lot of “what, so what” superfluous quips whenever she mentioned something potentially sexual (which was frequently). ex: “The city shined in the sunlight like a bunch of metallic boobs. What? I’m not a poet. They look like boobs.” It was also a bit unbelievable how much these character knew about 20th century popular culture and history. This story is supposed to be taking place about 100 years in the future; how much do any of you know about actors, poets, fads, etc from the late 19th century? These characters knew it like they lived it every day. And the colloquialisms are straight out of the late 90s. How many people still say “bite me” as a retort? Well, this character does, and many other crass digs, a lot. It’s juvenile to say the least.I didn’t read “The Martian”, and I don’t know why, but I really don’t see myself reading it at all now. If this is Andy Weir’s style, I’m not interested in anything else he’s done or will do. Given the numerous plot holes left dangling when the book finished, I can see Weir writing a sequel, though despite those holes it could arguably stand on it’s own. I might consider reading a sequel only to see those plot holes closed (I’m a glutton for punishment I guess), and as a break from the usual space opera and hard sci-fi I prefer, but I won’t buy the hardcover…I’ll get it on e-reader instead.

⭐ There’s a lot to like about Weir’s second novel, and plenty of signs that he can turn out more fun, exciting novels like The Martian, but Artemis is more promise than delivery. Weir’s strengths seem to lie in caper novels — The Martian was basically one long escape caper, right? — and when Artemis focusing on pure problem solving it’s plenty entertaining.But fitting the problems into the a full-fledged story is harder, and he fails altogether to join them with real, believable characters. The heroine of Artemis was presumably intended to be a charming rogue, a quick-witted, quick-mouthed smuggler with a heart of gold. Instead, she comes across as a hodgepodge of quirks and gimmicks, some programmer dude-bro’s dream girl awkwardly merged with a half-dozen issues of Cosmo from 1980. She starts off irritating, but I gave her some slack because I assumed from her attitude and personality that she was probably a precocious 12-year-old or so and should be growing up soon. When I discovered that she’s supposed to be 26, I lost patience and interest in her.The caper was disappointing. The details were all fine; solving the individual problems was fun. But the plan, as a whole, was just dumb. The heroine is supposed to be a genius (Weir goes out of his way to point this out, and then promptly forgets it), but the plan she comes up with misses so many obvious points that even Weir ended up having to lampshade it, having her plan fail the moment someone looked at it but then letting her get away with it for no good reason (except that the males in her life protected her and sheltered her). Maybe it was meant to be an ironic subversion of the hypercompetent protagonist? I don’t think so. I think it was just not thought through very well.If I sound harsh, it’s because there’s enough gold in here (and in The Martian) to show that Weir genuinely does have plenty of talent, and I hope he continues to build on it. I really like that he was trying to stretch himself a little here, going with a female protagonist who is certainly more nuanced than The Martian’s Boy Scout. He missed the balance, and his characters didn’t really come together, but I want to see more books from him. Just better thought through than Artemis.

⭐ I cannot believe I paid $12.99 for such a piece of drivel.This book contains not one modicum of character development, the dialog is horrendous, and the plot is boring and unexciting. The POV is that of a 26 y/o female; a gender and age which Andy Weir obviously knows nothing about. Where was the copy editor when this line was written? – “Once I got back to my coffin (room), I threw off my clothes faster than a drunk prom date.” ???Really???The story is supposed to take place over 100 years after the Moon Landing in 1969, yet there hasn’t been a single technological advancement since, suprisingly, the mid 2010’s when the book was written. Eg: the “Gizmo” communicator that is used (obviously nothing more than an iWatch) still needs to be plugged in to recharge. The futuristic “Moon society” depicted shows no societal evolution whatsoever (and, no, I don’t think the author did that purposefully – I think he has no imagination at all). The science, while I’m sure quite accurate, was boring, boring, boring. Just how much information about welding can the reader endure? Arggghh!Shame on you, Andy Weir. You owe me $12.99.

⭐ I was very much looking forward to this, after being really blown away by The Martian. The Martian was filled with scientific details and ruminations that made a lot of sense in the context of a scientist stranded alone and needing to figure his way out of dire situations. They propelled the story — helping to put the reader into the mind of the main character, struggling right alongside him. It felt unique and refreshing to me.I was really disappointed to see Andy Weir use the same exact technique in his second book — despite the different setting, different plot, and different protagonist. And, in my mind, it didn’t work. It didn’t propel the story. In my view, it was just a whole lot of details filling up pages that didn’t add value to the plot and in no way helped the reader care about the main character. I remember slogging through a long section on disabling a rock-hopper robot and thinking “Drat! I had such high hopes for this book!”I know that those who loved The Martian are definitely going to grab this book — but I don’t think that you will be happy with it. If you are interested in a moon-based detective/mystery-type story, check out Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s Retrival Artist series instead.

⭐ There are three aspects to this book, which all need comment: world building, plot, and characters.The world building is great. We’re given almost no tiring information about the future Earth, the story entirely focused on the details of life on a bustling moon base. Economics, law enforcement and socioeconomic status are all covered, and the ideas around them are clever and credible. The infodumps are a little contrived, but I’m sympathetic: it’s always hard to give the info without the dump.The plot is so-so. The story is fast-paced and attention-grabbing. But on the other hand, the ending is never in doubt, and the string of problems-to-be-solved are tricky situations merely created by the lead character’s mistakes. Unlike another certain previous book, there never seems to be much at stake.Finally, the characters.Ugh ugh ugh. A lot has already been said by others about the choice of lead character, and I can only agree. A 26-year-old Saudi Muslim woman, who swears, drinks, makes smutty jokes and sleeps her way through the Moon base: I ask why? There’s nothing wrong with such such a character if they’re believable and relevant to the plot. But these are not the case here. So much of what Jazz says or does causes the reader to come to a jarring stop to say “huh?”. This is basically Mark Watney without a Y chromosome. And the other characters are all one-dimensional stereotypes – you almost always know what they’re going to say before they say it.Overall, “Artemis” is a reasonable but not great read. The unfortunate reality is that it’s now up to Andy Weir’s next book to determine whether he will be a memorable author, or the author of one memorable novel.

⭐ Juvenile writing. Fast paced action with far too many “somehow” occurrences. “Somehow” is the writers escape when even he doesn’t know how the event occurred. While super-girl fiction is popular these days, it’s possible to become tired of rebellious teenagers after a hundred pages or so. The overall plot concept is interesting, and after a screenwriter’s treatment of the juvenile dialog and simplification of an overactive plot line this story could become an interesting movie. Lots of good action shots. But, sadly we have to deal with the novel in hand. The author seems to have fallen into the second novel slump. After the author’s good first novel “The Martian”, this novel is a sad disappointment. More hard science and less “somehow” escapes for the heroine, would have produced a much better novel.

⭐ Good news and bad news. First the bad news, I liked The Martian better and feel the Martian was a better book. Also while it seems to fit with the story line their is more profanity in Artemis than in the Martian. Now the good news, this is a fast paced, light very enjoyable read and I found myself at the end of the story wishing it was a bit longer. There is a lot of hard SCI FI in this story (so if discussion of orbits, pressure ratios, welding techniques turns you off then this is not the story for you, but if you want to see how the author seamlessly — like a good weld — puts this into his story then this is a good book for you). I also like how the author blended in some political and economic ideas — for instance guilds tend to serve as a tax on consumers and restrict choice, how economies start out as capitalist, grow to regulated and tax based economies, then turn to a nanny state (my words here) and finally collapse. I also like how the author used a female protagonist, a non observant Muslim, and adjusted the story line for this. All in all this book was a fun read and I found myself unable to put it down and nearly finished it in one (longish) sitting. I highly recommend the novel. I only hope the author does not wait so long for his next book.

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