Artemis by Andy Weir

[lightreads]

Artemis

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.

Comments

[marycontrary]

Is there a book you'd recommend specifically as an audiobook? I'm used to TTS for most of my aural story consumption, and I'm not sure what distinguishes a book as particularly good for a real reader. Thanks for considering the question

[lightreads]

Well, tbh, I read a lot via tts, though usually not published fiction these days, and I have complicated love/hate for it. But a good audio performance really can elevate a book (and also, I read almost entirely on my commute these days, meaning on public transit where it is very loud, and my brain is much better at parsing spoken English by a human voice than TTS when it is noisy). Anyway, if you want a pair of very good performances, try Code Name Verity, which has a different reader for each half. Both excellently cast. Or if you want a true multi-voice production with effects, try, Illuminae. Either will give you a sense of what good performance and good production can do for a book. Of course, a poor performance can also really detract.

[marycontrary]

Thanks!

[marycontrary]

If you will forgive me another tangent: I have an infuriating bug in TTS on my android phone when I use it with a bluetooth headphone or speaker: it drops whole sentences. Is this something anyone else encounters, or is it something I could change by changing phones?

[lightreads]

No idea, I don't have an Android.

[norah]

"Have you ever wanted to learn all about how to weld in space?"

LOL BEST HOOK EVER.

Agreed on all counts re: your review.