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Artemis by Andy Weir
Mar. 7th, 2018 08:58 pmArtemis
3/5. Have you ever wanted to learn all about how to weld in space? Well! Have I got the book for you! On a nearish future moon colony, a down-on-her-luck smuggler gets involved in a complicated industrial espionage plot with political implications. Then she solves engineering problems in space because Andy Weir.
I do not envy him having to put out a sophomore book after, you know, the wildly successful movie. And this is a good effort, and so very him. See above re the multiple lengthy sequences of hacking together solutions to life-threatening space problems on the fly. That is his genre. And this book is, purely on a technical craft level, noticeably better writing than The Martian. Though he still leans waaaaaay too heavily on a conversational talking-to-reader style that trips over into splaining very easily.
But I didn’t like it as much as The Martian. Even though it’s more diverse and way better characterized and significantly better written. I think my issue is that the main character is a fuck up. The sort of person who hears a lot about how smart she is, why is she wasting her potential. Which she isn’t, it turns out. But what she is doing is making a series of really, really, really stupid decisions. Like no shit that went bad, Einstein, decisions. Like I could not tolerate her as even a distant acquaintance because I would want to strangle her and then fix her life, except then I would not give her life back to her because she would just fuck it up again, ugh.
So, I guess he really is stepping up his characterization game if she could bug me that much.
Audio note: Rosario Dawson reads the commercial audio, because that’s what happens when the last book got a movie. She is A++++ for both performance and casting.
3/5. Have you ever wanted to learn all about how to weld in space? Well! Have I got the book for you! On a nearish future moon colony, a down-on-her-luck smuggler gets involved in a complicated industrial espionage plot with political implications. Then she solves engineering problems in space because Andy Weir.
I do not envy him having to put out a sophomore book after, you know, the wildly successful movie. And this is a good effort, and so very him. See above re the multiple lengthy sequences of hacking together solutions to life-threatening space problems on the fly. That is his genre. And this book is, purely on a technical craft level, noticeably better writing than The Martian. Though he still leans waaaaaay too heavily on a conversational talking-to-reader style that trips over into splaining very easily.
But I didn’t like it as much as The Martian. Even though it’s more diverse and way better characterized and significantly better written. I think my issue is that the main character is a fuck up. The sort of person who hears a lot about how smart she is, why is she wasting her potential. Which she isn’t, it turns out. But what she is doing is making a series of really, really, really stupid decisions. Like no shit that went bad, Einstein, decisions. Like I could not tolerate her as even a distant acquaintance because I would want to strangle her and then fix her life, except then I would not give her life back to her because she would just fuck it up again, ugh.
So, I guess he really is stepping up his characterization game if she could bug me that much.
Audio note: Rosario Dawson reads the commercial audio, because that’s what happens when the last book got a movie. She is A++++ for both performance and casting.