Artemis

The Setting:
A nascent industrial colonisation of the moon where the economic interest of the super-powerful and tourists go hand in hand with a poor-ish lifestyle of accidents, some petty criminality and an overall small-town feeling combined with cosmopolitan tourism. The world building is well executed, and gives a believable image of the different economic actors and people's dynamics of the functioning of a small-size lunar complex. Interludes in the form of email exchanges with a character on earth provide the most interesting bits of background information on what goes on on earth.

The Characters:
The main character suffers from a healthy dose of Mary Sueism, she is so smart, she is so clever. This is somewhat balanced by bad choices made in her youth, and the idea that “just because I'm smart, it don't mean I need to follow a boring career”. It seems an attempt to create a balanced character, that doesn't always work. The supporting characters are stereotypes on steroids and seem to have been defined ad hoc: “techy nerdy engineer with a penchant for sex”, “brooding and disappointed father with infinite honesty”, “power-hungry billionaire with a soft spot for his daughter”, and so on. Each seems to push their main character feature to the extreme and is not really a believable and fleshed-out character even at the end of the book.

The Story:
The main plot is ok. It revolves around the challenges of making your own way in a place that offers plenty of opportunities, even though many of them would actually involve effort and unexcitement. An underlying “big change” in the socio-political structure of the colony leads the action, with some run of the mill undercover action, some sabotage and some saving the colony even though they may not recognise your efforts. Many of the episodes seem a bit constructed to bring along the plot or to be conveniently explained at a later moment in the book. All in all, however, an easy and pretty linear plot.

The Author and the Martian:
It looks like Weir tried to put in a number of things that made The Martian great: “101 ways in which space will kill you”, plus some chemistry/physics/engineering to satisfy the interested mind, and an inner dialogue of someone with an attitude. However, to me the comparisons stops there. While in his first book you had one character that you got to know little by little, and you accompanied through the intellectual challenges of survival in a really bad place, here the development is rather narrow, and you have a non-credible character that can learn electronics design on the morning, hack robots at noon and destroy smelting installations in the afternoon. In The Martian you were given reasons to believe the main character was smart enough to work out inventive solutions to his challenges, here you dont really know why you should.

The Audiobook:
Rosario Dawson makes a wonderful job of reading it and getting across the badassness of the main character.

Overall:
It's a good book. It lacks the spark that made the Martian great both as a book to read and as a world to think about, but it is still enjoyable. It's difficult to read it without thinking of the Luna series by Ian McDonald, which presents basically the same world, but with far more breadth and depth, showing the lunar world from different social classes and perspectives and at a more complex stage of development. Still well worth the read.