I raced through this book , if only it could be twice as long . I want to travel with these characters to Mars and anywhere else within my life span . More please .

Loved the Martian and this book had a similar level of detail, with excellent elements of speculative fiction. However overall it wasn't as gripping as the previous book. I'd read more of his work though

So original. So good. Hope they make this into a film too. Loved it.

Having been a huge fan of the Martian, I was so - SO - disappointed on reading this. There's nothing I can say about the "voice" of Jazz that hasn't already been said; being a woman of that age myself, it just didn't ring true in the slightest. Happily the author has addressed in an AMA that he DOES read that feedback and he is taking it on board for his next book!
Which leads me to my other source of disappointment - I loved the setting of this book. Andy Weir does research so well, and I loved the Lunar base. I loved reading about the inspiration for the names of the zones, and about how they managed bringing resources in, as well as their distribution once they were there. Everything was just so fantastic, and that it was filtered through the voice of a protagonist that I just couldn't engage with was frustrating beyond belief!

Jazz is a smuggler, and when the chance arises to strengthen her CV she does not hesitate. But it's messing around with one of the biggest companies on the moon, it's not exactly the safest job on the planet.
Hilarious and dark, Weir does not disappoint with his followup from The Martian. I adored this novel as much as I enjoyed his previous work.
P.S. There are less potatoes in this one.

Wickedly funny and full of action. I really felt immersed in the world of Artemis and it made me hope that one day science will have made enough technological advances for a city on the moon to be a reality (although hopefully without the corrupt individuals!)

This is a rollicking good read! It tells the story of Jazz Bashara, a young woman living in Artemis, the first human city on the moon. Jazz officially works as a porter but makes money on the side as a smuggler and is roped in to take part in a caper that has some pretty big consequences. Firstly, I loved the character of Jazz, more specifically, her voice. She is our narrator and she is so sassy, sardonic and funny that you just get swept up in her world without even trying. Once again, Weir cleverly intersperses the technical details of living on the moon seamlessly into the narrative so that it never seems overly information heavy or didactic. The plot is simple and the pacing is good, ensuring that you move through the story at a breakneck pace all the way to what is a very satisfying climax. Overall, this is a great book and fans of The Martian should definitely check this one out too.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I absolutely loved The Martian so of course Artemis went straight to the top of my wish list the minute I heard about it. I'll tell you upfront that this is very different to Andy Weir's first story but it was still a great read that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Jazz is a criminal who makes her money smuggling contraband into Artemis, the first city built on the moon. She's not the biggest crime lord on the block but she's fiercely independent and smart enough to work the system in her own favour. When she's offered the chance to cash in on the job of a lifetime she jumps at it thinking she'll finally have enough money to start living the high life that Artemis is so well known for but it doesn't take long before things go horribly wrong when her contact is murdered. She soon finds herself in the middle of a war, caught between the mob on one side and the police on the other. Her only chance of survival is pulling of a heist that is so tricky it's just as likely to be the death of her rather than the salvation she desperately needs.

Artemis is such a fun read, very fast paced and full of action it was hard to put down once I'd started reading. I loved Jazz, she was snarky and sarcastic, a little too mouthy for her own good and very sure of herself but she has the skills to back up her confidence and I enjoyed seeing her work out how to achieve her goals. This story was a lot lighter than The Martian and a very different tone but Andy Weir still excels at making science interesting and including all sorts of fascinating information in his stories that just make his worlds feel even more believable. We have a larger cast of characters here and they all had their own personality quirks and added something unique to the story.

Although this story works perfectly as a stand alone I can't help hoping that the author will revisit this world again in the future, I'd definitely be happy to see this turned into a series. Either way Andy Weir has earned a spot on my auto buy authors list and I'm looking forward to seeing where his imagination will take us next.

After the excellent space odyssey that was The Martian, I found Artemis disappointing to say the least. For the most part it was the characters, who felt strangely two dimensional after Mark. and for me that's an immediate turnoff.

On the bright side, the scientific stuff returns.

Dang. We all really wanted to love this book after the monster science hug that THE MARTIAN unexpectedly gave us a few years back. The geek science is still there to be enjoyed, detailed and highly credible, and you never have cause to doubt the intelligence and passion of author Andy Weir here in his field of interest.

We see again some toasty dry humour, but without that sense of impeding peril ARTEMIS struggles to engage us in the fate of its lead, petty criminal Jazz Bashara.

Jazz isn't hideously unlikable, but other than being rather admirably tenacious, she's not that likeable either. She's sketched a little too thin and the reader really needed for her to have a better sense of purpose in order to have a vested interest in her fate. Jazz's intentions didn't have be that noble, but considering the out-of-world setting, they could have been a lot more perilous and suspenseful. There are parts where Jazz is required to look outside of the personal ramifications to herself and think instead of the safety of others living at Artemis, but these scenarios just seem just inclusions to move the technical narrative along. Also, the danger to others is a consequence of Jazz's own actions on the whole anyway.

In the keen hands of Andy Weir, ARTEMIS gives us great insights to what practical challenges there might be to our future living outside of our own planet. It will happen some day on a larger scale of course, and Artemis is a living breathing city with all the usual challenges and petty concerns that would be scaled up to large potential disasters in a hostile 'off earth' environment.

As with THE MARTIAN, the strength of the writing lies in the imagining of the environment and the ever present threat to human life via any one of many small mistakes that could be made. The people depicted as living here in Artemis are mostly self serving, and there isn't the 'brave new world' community identity. It is on the whole every woman for herself. (Or man, etc).

ARTEMIS satisfies the space/science fan in all of us but needed better characterization and an a keener editorial eye cast over where all of the 'wacky races' shenanigans were going to end up. Too many broad brush strokes are made at the novel's conclusion to tidy it all up when it would have been just as okay to go a little dark, rather than feature film fodder light.

Looking forward to anything more that Weir can bring by way of a space action novel with less goof and more attention paid to what possible uniquely frightening space catastrophes could await us out there as we further explore and populate planets and moons other than our own.

Along with everyone else in the world, I had been waiting for something new from Andy Weir with baited breath. I was completely ready to read more about Mark Watney because after reading The Martian he became one of my all time favourite characters. But Artemis is actually about a young woman called Jazz.

Jazz is a non-practising Muslim woman who has lived in Artemis (a city on the moon) since she was six years old. She’s very intelligent and into science, and she has a very foul mouth. I’ve seen some criticism regarding the bad language that Jazz uses as well as her sexual jokes, but I didn’t have a problem with it. I don’t think it was unrealistic or a bad attempt from a male author at writing a female character. Like, you should hear the way some of my friends speak.

So yeah, I liked Jazz. There were moments where I was a bit put out by how good she was at everything, but I figured that this is a book about a city on the moon, so I could suspend my disbelief a bit.

I don’t have anything to say about the side characters because I didn’t care for any of them. I did, however, dislike how few female characters there were. Especially prominent female characters. It would have been good for Jazz to have more female friends.

In terms of the plot, it’s a heist story. The first two thirds were great as they were completely action packed, and I loved exploring Artemis and learning about the economy and politics. But the ending wasn’t fantastic, to be honest. It’s a shame, but oh well.

One other problem I had was the reusable condom. I mean, it’s not my own personal problem, but a problem with that part of the book. One of Jazz’s friends invented a reusable condom and asked Jazz to test it out. It kept coming up again and again, to the point where I was wondering if this condom would save the moon or something. But it didn’t. In fact, I don’t know what the point of this condom or the constant nagging was. Could it have been a way for the inventor to keep an eye on Jazz’s sex life? That’s the only thing I can think of and that’s pretty gross.

I will definitely be reading more from Andy Weir in the future. I was excited to learn that he is working on more science fiction, and that he is reading reviews for Artemis and taking the feedback on board. That’s pretty great. Artemis definitely had some issues with pacing and the plot, but overall it was an enjoyable book with a lot of snark.

Question: how to top a book like the Martian? Answer: You probably can’t.
However this is a pretty good attempt to produce a book that will appeal to those folks who liked the Martian for its main character’s ability to ‘science the shit’ out of any situation. It’s certainly a page-turner. This time the main character is Jazz (female) who has lived in the Moon’s only city since she was a small child. She’s fiercely intelligent, but pretty much a delinquent, using her talents to become a small-time criminal, doing a low-pay courier job while running a smuggling racket on the side. She takes on a job that she should walk away from (the money’s too good to refuse) and after that she’s scrabbling to recover from the consequences. If you enjoyed the problem-solving in The Martian, there’s problem solving a-plenty in this, plus intrigue and nail-biting peril.

Artemis is one of those must-read books for me after how much I adored The Martian I knew that reading it was inevitable. I was so excited to get approved on Netgalley and then put off reading for reasons unknown so as soon as I guessed it was coming in my Illumicrate (because I am a genius detective) I knew that I’d wait and read my shiny new physical copy. I am so glad I have a copy because I enjoyed this book immensely. I didn’t want to stop reading and it hooked me in even though I wasn’t sure what type of direction it was going in. I loved the mystery/thriller/heist sort of book that was a mix of all things and I loved that all of the characters were pretty damn smart. After reading a couple of reviews, though, I have realised a glaring flaw in this book, it slut shames and has characters which folks with either like or hate.

Let’s begin with the good, I was gripped by this book. One of my biggest complaints in The Martian is that the science was too hard and too frequent and those chunks of writing bored me, I didn’t have that in this one. Instead, the story was more fast-paced and you just sort of roll with it. Is there science and technical explanations? Yeah, but it’s not overwhelming and they aren’t anywhere near as long so I could handle it. This book dives right in with a heist which moves into a mystery which goes into another heist and never did I find myself getting bored or not following the story, instead I was there for every page.

You also get a totally kickass MC in the form of Jazz. She has essentially grown up on Artemis, the only town on the Moon and she has developed her own smuggling business on the moon. As soon as you meet her it’s immediately obvious she is smart, and although many claim she wasted her potential I really loved that she wasn’t striving to take over the world but instead followed her own path and had a wide path of interests. She won’t be for everyone, I know I had a few gripes apart her character, but she is easy to like and I was invested in her story from the get-go.

I liked that the folks on the Moon, especially those who lived there, were smart and experts in their chosen fields, not idiots who are there to move the story along. Often when you have a smart MC the characters around them get dumbed down but that wasn’t the case, instead, they are just as smart and the MC, in fact, relies upon their expertise to help her solve a mystery or plan a heist or two. I can’t say whether or not what the characters say is accurate because I know nothing about science or economics or welding but it sounded pretty good at least.

Now, like I said, there were gripes to be had. I loved how Jazz was so freaking smart and that she was smart but still made mistakes (you guys who’ve read it will know the big booboo I’m thinking of) but I kind of felt like it was never fleshed out why she was so smart. Like, it seemed like she had this really good memory but with no explanation, I found it a little crazy how she seemed to be able to read up on something and then just knew about it. I was close to rolling my eyes because she was a little too good. And then there was the fact that it was mentioned she was good looking as well, which is totally cool, but it almost seemed like she was a Mary Sue. It wasn’t quite that bad but I did have a couple of ‘seriously’ moments. I also found it weird how a couple of times she did something which a character deemed sexy or she herself was self-aware of her sexiness. I know there are moments people can deem someone as sexy and sometimes you can do something intentionally but it was when she was doing something normal and it was just a little weird.

That kind of leads into the other problem of this book, there is slut shaming. Jazz was a sexually active woman and no more promiscuous than any other person so it’s weird people made such a thing out of that when other characters actions were way more questionable (I’m looking at you Dale). I just didn’t feel comfortable with the whole part of the book where Jazz is continually demeaned or has rubbing from others for who she’s slept with, totally not cool.

Basically, this book is good in one sense. It’s fun and easy to read and totally a great sci-fi romp that I will happily read again. On the other hand, it needed some work doing on the characters and it definitely needed some better female representation. Don’t get me wrong, there were some brilliant women in this book, but why did Jazz have to be slut-shamed and good at like everything? These things bothered me and definitely affected my opinion on the book as I pondered it the day after finishing.

I've spent a good three weeks trying to come up with a way to review this, and I'm failing miserably. Solution: a quick explanation of my rating.

Two stars. And one of them is because when it /finally/ picked up speed (and gosh did I wait a while for that to happen) and wasn't just the ramblings of a immature and - to me - unrealistic character, this actually got good for a while. The other star? I genuinely don't remember, but I probably had a good reason at the time.

In short: great premise, shoddy execution, sub-par character development.

9 things you need to know about Artemis
1. Artemis is the second novel by Andy Weir. Like The Martian, the book is undated but set roughly seventy years in the future.
2. This time we’re on the moon. The title Artemis refers to the name of the first lunar city, population 2,000.
3. As in any city, there’s dirty politics and an underclass of workers, criminals and chancers.
4. You might be surprised by who is winning the space race…
5. The moon has 1/6th of the Earth’s gravity. Which means that on the moon anyone can run faster, jump higher.. it's basically like being a superhero.
6. Duct tape is back! But no potatoes. There is gunk though…
7. Gunk is a food substance derived from algae and grown in vats. It’s made palatable (barely) by flavourings. It’s what most average people eat in Artemis. (Unless you’re rich and can afford to import those potatoes).
8. The main character is Jazz Bashara. She’s a young criminal - witty, awesome and every bit as memorable as Mark Watney.
9. Artemis is a standalone novel. It doesn’t feature Mark Watney - though we do wonder what would happen if Mark met Jazz in the future...

With this note I've been approved to read Artemis thanks to Netgalley. As you can see on my blog, I'm usually not that much into Sci-Fi, so when I got to read The martian some years back, it was out of my norm. I tremendously enjoyed it, as you can read here:
So, Artemis huh?! Let's see... What probably everyone knows is, is that Andy Weir got rejected with the Martian so many times, that he started selfpublishing. What i want to say: professionals thought his writing wasn't good. Guess what? I agree to that.
I'm sure he is a funny guy, I do like some of his ideas. What I loved about the Martian was that you really never knew if Mark would survive or not. That the technicalities were nescessary to the story. That his humor made kinda sense.
Jazz on the other hand... is basically Mark in a female body, but without all the rest. So while I read that she is a woman, she never felt like one to me. I don't care all too much if the narrative is female or male, so for me Jazz was just genderless most of the times.
Her humor was way out of place and most of the time not funny.

"I knew what I had to do- I just didn't like it. I'd have to blow the remaining two at the same time.
Please don't quote that last sentence out of context."

My critic with Mark had been that he never really had a meltdown. The answer: He only recorded a log when he was in a stable mood.
Jazz isn't recording anything, but is still talking to the audience, it's still all treated as a journal kind of thing. Which doesn't work. She's the local lunar tramp, poor, and willing to smuggle for a little extra cash. She needs a certain amount of money and agrees to do a bigger heist for 1 Million Slugs ( artemis money). Problem with this? I really don't care. She doesn't either, or so it seems. And for someone poor she sure is using a lot of money!
Oh, and she is super duper smart. Yeah, ok.
Don't get me wrong, I finished the book in 3 days. It really entertained me. The way Ben Stillers Tower Heist did. You can relax, don't think to much ( because Andy tells you everything), eat a snack. Nice and easy, no drama.
I liked the bits that actually involved information on living on the moon and the society structure.
So, you get humor, some action scences involving science, a little bit of moon, not so deep characters, and not so many feelings. Sounds like a book for you?

“By the way, we also hate it when people . . . call Artemis "the city in space." We're not in space; we're on the moon. I'm mean, technically, we're in space, but so is London.”

Review will be online on my blog December 11th.

Simply the best book I have read in the last few years - and I read an awful lot of books.
Please, author, may we hear more of Jazz?

I'll start by saying that The Martian is one of my favourite books of all time (and the film, too!) so I had tremendously high hopes for Artemis. Did I love it as much as The Martian? I don't think so (but it's hard to live up to when it's one of my favourite books ever). Was it a worthy second book that blew my expectations out the water. YES. I loved Artemis!

Andy Weir has moved his crazy, imaginative storytelling from Mars to the surface of the Moon - more specifically, the first settlement called Artemis. I instantly loved the setup of Artemis. It's a city made up of 5 'bubbles' each with their own purpose. According to the author himself, "Armstrong is industry, Aldrin is the tourist center with casinos and hotels and stuff, Conrad is where the blue-collar folks live, the low-income people. Bean is sort of like suburban life; it's middle-income folks. And then Shepard is where the really rich people live."

Then we have our main character, Jazz: a feisty Saudi Arabian woman who smuggles contraband into Artemis to make some extra slugs (the currency used in Artemis. Weird name, I know, but it's all explained. That's what I love about Weir's books - literally everything is explained in great detail.) I instantly had a picture of Jazz in my head. If it wasn't for the fact that she's Asian, I'd want to cast her in a film as Ellen Page from her Juno era. Imagine Juno's her sass, wit and clever comebacks - that's Jazz. A few other reviewers seemed to take a dislike to her, saying that Weir basically took what they disliked about Mark Watney (the protagonist in The Martian) and gave those traits to Jazz, making her annoying and unlikeable. I must admit, I can see where they're coming from - but I loved her. She made me laugh so many times, and OK, she might still seem too much like a 'man', making masculine jokes and not acting like a 'lady' - but why should every female do that?

The story did take a little while to get going and at one point, I worried that I wouldn't like the book. However, once I got into it, I didn't want to stop reading. (OK, the fact the book took me 3 months to read is a different story. That's nothing to do with the book and more down to me being lazy.) The whole story is full of suspense, surprises, and complete and utter shock at some of the things that happened. (Mostly things that went horrifically wrong - especially towards the end. No spoilers.) There are a couple of characters that I wished were explored a bit more because I wanted to know more about them, but I didn't mind at all.

Another thing people complained about was that the scientific explanations in Artemis are mostly to do with welding. Again, they're right. But it wasn't particularly a thing I even picked up on until I read other people's reviews. Jazz's dad is a welder by trade so she's picked up his skills along the way. They come in handy a good number of times, and that's when the process is explained in detail. As I said above, I *love* detail! It could be about anything and I'd probably still in engrossed in the ins and outs of it all. There were a few moments when the plot felt a little slow, but I think the fact paced action of the rest of the book made up for the slower parts.

So, if you loved The Martian and you want another great book from Andy Weir, I'd definitely recommend Artemis. My advice is to go in with an open mind - don't expect it to be the same as The Martian, because it feels completely different. I think that's great though - I'm glad it wasn't just The Martian on the Moon! I really enjoyed Artemis and I'm so glad I have a beautiful hardback to go proudly on my shelf. It's only just come out and I'm already excited to see what Andy Weir comes up with next!

Hello again. Sorry I have missed a couple of WIRs. I have been busy reading books for SPFBO 2017 and can't share my opinion of those books quite yet. I hope you have had some good books to enjoy while I have been offline. Let me tell you of two of the non-SPFBO books I have been reading.



First up is Andy Weir's Artemis. This standalone novel has been released recently but was I pretty lucky to receive it from the publisher via NetGalley a few months ago.

The story is set on the moon and features the plucky Jazz, who spends her days pushing contraband and living just shy on the right side of the law. She grew up on the moon, in the city of Artemis and loves every inch of it. When she gets an offer that will give her the life she yearns for it seems almost too good to be true. If it seems to good to be true it usually is. Its not long before Jazz is on the run from a criminal syndicate that plans to take over Artemis. With just her wits and her friends Jazz is determined to save the only home she has ever really known.

I rather enjoyed Artemis although it did take a couple of chapters for me to adjust to Jazz and her rather dubious moral code. This book is completely different in content and tone to Martian so if you are expecting another good guy then you may be disappointed with the more complex Jazz. I liked Artemis as a setting and all the sciency bits that made the plot more credible. The plot was interspersed with letters between Jazz and her childhood pen friend and this plot device helps to develop Jazz as a character and later on to help advance the plot. This is a quick, easy read with a strong female lead that I enjoyed. Science fiction fans be sure to take a chance on Artemis.

Book 2 for me was the third instalment of the Crossbreed series by Dannika Dark - Deathtrap. In this instalment Raven Black is set on the trail of criminal who is kidnapping breed children, killing their mothers and then selling them on the black market. All of the 'gang' are involved in this one and different sides are told through POV chapters. All this comes with Raven trying to reconcile letting her human life go and saying good-bye to her father. Helping her is the hunky vampire Christian who Raven is drawn towards, despite her hatred of vampires.

This series is very much light relief for me. The plot isn't challenging but there is enough substance to make it readable. Raven is not without her flaws which makes her a more likable character but Dark introduces a coincidental meeting that, in my view, adds nothing to the main romance of the story. Overall, an OK read but I am not expecting any big surprises.

That is it for me this week. Hope to be back next week but I do a few more SPFBO books to read so if I miss another week it's not because I'm not reading. Be back soon!

This was a grave disappointment after The Martian.
The main character was over the top with sarcasm in the attempt to be witty.
Not successful at all.
All the characters lacked depth.
The Technical part of the story was ok but all in all this left a lot to be desired.

I have received this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Jazz is a criminal - she makes deliveries and some of those are - well, less than legal. After a falling out with her father, she lives in an awful, tiny place in the only city in the Moon - Artemis. When she fails her EVA master test, she needs to start saving all over again to buy a new suit and be able to get a better job. But then, she's offered a million for doing a dangerous job. It's risky and she's never done a heist before, but with that kind of money, all her problems would be gone. But her job is far more dangerous to her and the city than she knows.

Artemis is a sci-fi novel for sci-fi lovers. Although this is a thriller and has a heist story, plus it's set on the moon, and The Martian was such a nice read with genre-cross appeal, Artemis is not that easy for readers who don't like sci-fi. It's a bit heavier on the technological side and has plenty of chemistry which I suppose it's easy to skim through, but you miss part of the story that way.

If you do like sci-fi, you'll really enjoy this novel!

At first, Jazz's voice felt to me a little too movie-like, a little too much like the author was trying to write a cool female character and tended to overdo it a bit, turning her into the main character from The Martian, jokes and all. It sounded artificial and she definitely felt like a woman written by a man. But as the novel goes on, Jazz really grew on me and, by the end, I very much liked her! She is sarcastic, very intelligent and full of confidence and scheming. I also loved that she's Arab!

I wasn't too big a fan of the Brazilian representation in this novel - they were, like Jazz, too much of a caricature for me. I tried to overlook it and told myself it was cool to see Brazilians in novels not being just a sexy girl or an expert samba dancer and such. Especially as villains! But they were basically all trained in the streets to be fighters and ruthless and with no morals. As thriller villains all are, I suppose... plus the physical description included "Latina skin", which is too stereotypical for my taste.

I also didn't quite like the emails exchanged between Jazz and Kelvin, although it gave insight into what she was like and how the smuggling idea came up etc, it definitely broke the narrative.

The best way to enjoy this novel is not to compare it to The Martian - yes, I know, it's difficult, but really it's more enjoyable like that! This is about heist, running against the clock, conspiracy. It has more action than The Martian but lacks its uniqueness, in my opinion. This ended up being a very entertaining and fast read for me, and the idea of a city in the Moon, where you walk with 1/6th of the gravity was quite interesting! I wish there had been a little more world-building in the beginning so it didn't feel like getting information dumped on you at some parts of the novel.

Sorry for complaining so much, there were just various points in this novel that stopped me from giving it 5 stars. But it was a very enjoyable sci-fi and I read it in one day! I enjoyed the heist story, the sass, the moon setting and the ending very much!