Review: Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Andy Weir blew my mind with The Martian. It is rare for me to round a four-point-five-star rating up to a five-star rating, yet I enjoyed The Martian so much such is what happened. Thus, I had high hopes for Andy Weir’s next release, and was more than a little bit curious about Artemis.

If I’m being completely honest, my feelings towards Artemis are extremely mixed. It is not in the same league as The Martian, yet it did have some enjoyable moments. Despite the enjoyable moments and telling myself not to expect a repeat of The Martian, I found myself feeling disappointed.

Artemis had so much potential. I love a good heist and I love science fiction – therefore, I should have loved a story following criminal activities on the moon. It sounded like the perfect read for me, and when you add in how much I enjoyed The Martian I expected to adore this. Except, I didn’t. As I’ve mentioned, there were moments – these moments, however, were not enough.

In many ways, it felt as though Artemis was trying too hard. There were many elements of the story that were interesting, but it seemed the book was desperately attempting to imitate some of the elements that made The Martian intensely popular. Unfortunately, such elements did not seem to work with this story. The scientific information seemed to come in blocks, rather than the witty intelligence of The Martian. The humour seemed forced, rather than the countless giggles of The Martian. The main character seemed to be a badly done female attempting to be our lead from The Martian.

In fact, I could easily have quite the rant about how difficult it was to connect with our lead. I hate to be the person to say it, but it is clearly one of those cases where the author could not write from a woman’s point of view. This isn’t me trying to be sexist, far from it. There are plenty of women who cannot write males out there, too. It’s not always the case that a person cannot write the opposite gender, but sometimes it is. Were it not for the regular references to our lead being a female, I would have spent the entire book believing we were following a male lead.

I really wanted to enjoy Artemis in the same way I enjoyed The Martian, yet such was not to be. There were certainly some moments that I found myself enjoying, but it was not enough to win me over. With a little bit of luck, I’ll enjoy whatever Andy Weir releases next a lot more.

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