Question: How many smelters could a smelter melter melt if a smelter melter could melt smelters?
Answer: As many smelters as a smelter melter could melt if a smelter melter could melt smelters.
Artemis
Author: Andy Weir
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
Published: November 14, 2017
Publisher: Ballantine Books
View on Goodreads
Date Completed: July 12, 2024
My rating: 
Thoughts
If you picked up Artemis expecting another hit like The Martian, you probably recognized some elements more than others and were overall disappointed. Well, that’s on you expecting the author to write the same book twice. I mean, we now have a female lead instead of a male, it’s on the Moon instead of Mars, by all accounts Jazz should have died and… well, so should have Mark. Well, Jazz is super snarky and swears a lot. Mark… did too… maybe he did write the same book twice…
It’s hard not to compare this book to Andy Weir’s previous hit, The Martian. What I have noticed about a lot of peoples’ reactions and reviews of this book is that their complaint is that it either wasn’t The Martian at all or that it was too much like The Martian. I will attempt to review this book based on its merits alone and not those of The Martian. (Say The Martian one more time… I dare you…)
Artemis takes place on the first Moon city/colony called [checks notes] Artemis. And it’s told in first-person narrative by Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara. She’s Saudi Arabian, which you know because she mentions it a lot.
The world building in this book is amazing. The maps at the front of the book help a ton, but the descriptions of the domes, the train, the Apollo 11 Visitor Center, and everything else really help the reader to get a visual of the place. Even the desolate landscape of the Moon is described well.
The characters are also easily distinguished and utilized well throughout. From Svoboda, to Dale, her dad, Ngugi, Bob… little Moe with the gimpy leg… okay not the last one. Svoboda was probably my favorite character after Jazz. He’s like that nerdy sidekick friend, kind of an oddball.
There was a ton of diversity among the characters in this book. This is good because even though the port was owned or operated by a Kenyan authority, obviously people from all over Earth are going to emigrate (or immigrate) to the Moon. It was an interesting, and not altogether incorrect probably, choice to have a lot of the ethnic groups kind of stick together. Rather than just having a big melting pot where everyone gets along and whatever.
The actual plot of the book was kind of fun, even though our main character was doing things that were shady at best and dangerous and negligent at worst. The whole plot starts with Jazz trying to get rich. In the end, it’s about trying to prevent some gangsters (think mafia, not bikers) from cornering the market on oxygen production or energy transfer or whatever. So of course it’s for the greater good in the end.
There were some things I didn’t care for in this book, which ended up dropping my rating down.
First off, and I’m not a prude, but there was way too much swearing. I swear quite a bit myself, but Jazz’s profanity was just excessive. It was even pointed out a few times that she was getting so frustrated that would invent new swear words. Come on. That’s not needed.
Her snark was a bit too much too. It’s something I didn’t care for in The Martian either, but it seems that Weir doubled down on the snark in this one. I understand it’s for the sake of humor. I also understand that this is told in first-person from Jazz’s point of view. So there’s some amount of real world or free association factored in. But it made her somewhat unlikable. And really it just seemed forced.
Lastly, it seemed like a copout to give her pretty much a photographic memory. Like she could look at a schematic of the smelter or the oxygen lines in Artemis and she’s good to go. There was suspense in other ways, but it would have been better if she had the possibility of failure due to misremembering or just stress affecting her memory or something.
In the end, I gave this 4 out of 5 stars. It moved along at a pretty good pace and was generally fairly suspenseful. And although I found the main character somewhat unlikable, it was fun traveling around the Moon with her as she did her nefarious things.
