Artemis - Andy Weir

'I live in Conrad Down 15, a grungy area fifteen floors underground in Conrad Bubble. If my neighbourhood were wine, connoisseurs would describe it as "shitty, with undertones of failure and poor life decisions."'

Hi!

I was absolutely over the Moon about this book even before it came out. Seriously, ever since I read The Martian by Andy Weir two years ago, I've been pretty much waiting for this one. I've been on an orbit around it, seriously. Almost like a lunatic.

I must admit, this and The Martian are almost like from different planets. The Martian was a very contained solitary adventure with a solid plot, filled with fun and jokes and written mostly like a diary. Artemis, on the other hand, was not solitary - Jazz has many interesting companions - and in some ways much more serious. It deals with a lot of topics I wouldn't have thought it would venture to. It was, still, a fun adventure.

The writing of this book wasn't necessarily like a sea of tranquility, but it was entertaining. One of my favourite things about The Martian was how I felt like I was learning new things, and this book certainly had that aspect in it too. It is, however, less science-driven and more character-driven.

Jazz is a career criminal who's grown up in Artemis, the first city on the moon. She's working hard to repay an old debt, so when she gets the chance to earn one million slugs (that's the currency) she jumps at it - turning the book into a heist storJazz is quite a complex character, and in my mind she gets points for (being female, obviously), being Saudi Arabian (representation!!), her sense of humour and her intelligence. That's not to say she wasn't sometimes annoying, but... protagonists. As I mentioned before, the rest of the cast was really cool and interesting too, and quite diverse. Jazz even has an Earth penpal living in Kenya, and their conversations provide the reader with more information on Jazz's background.

The actual plot of this book starts kind of late, and I felt that the beginning dragged a little too. Because of this, it took me almost a month to read. I bought it on day one, too! And just as unfortunately, the ending happened all too suddenly, and the whole main conflict was resolved and padded down in about 30 pages. For these pacing issues and the less scientific aspects of this book, I took it down one star. To be honest, I can imagine The Martian taking three years to write and this one taking half a year, or something of the sort. Regardless, this book was fun and I'd recommend it. I'll definitely read it again too - I'm sure there's a lot to still discover in the details.

For the Helmet 2017 reading challenge I put this in category 49: A new book of 2017 - I switched Caraval from that to 'recommended by a librarian' since I picked it up from being on show at Lahti Library.

PS. I won't even Apollo-gise for all these puns, it was just too good of an opportunity to pass.

PPS. @ Alex, I hope you're doing well!! Thanks again for introducing Andy Weir to me! 😀

The Martian - Andy Weir

‘You probably think losing a crewman is the worst thing that can happen. Not true. Losing the whole crew is worse. You kept that from happening.

     But there’s something more important we need to discuss: What is it with you and disco? I can understand the ‘70s TV because everyone loves hairy people with huge collars. But disco?

     Disco!?’

A friend of mine told me to read this book, so… I did. If you haven’t familiarised yourself with the main idea after all the media coverage the movie adaptation from last year caused, it’s about a guy, Mark Watney, who gets stranded on Mars and tries to get back to Earth. It sounds like a pretty daunting task of course, but if anyone can do it, I’d most definitely put my money on him. He’s optimistic – the book states that his pleasant personality was part of the reason why he was on the mission to begin with –, a botanist and a fix-it-all sort of a person. It’s pretty perfect.

I often hear people say that the plot is something like this: Mark does a thing. Thing goes wrong. He fixes thing. He does another thing, and so on. I’m not going to claim that this isn’t true, but I don’t think it fully captures just how gripping the book is, how you really do feel Mark’s agony when he almost dies over and over again.

The story is mostly told through his sol logs, with witty commentary on the day’s events (I spent a long time deciding on a quote because I liked so many things!!) and things dumbed down just enough but not assuming that the reader is stupid by any means. I mostly identify first person POV with annoying YA main characters, but I’m fully convinced that this book is what it was made for. Even though he’s stranded on a strange planet all alone, he doesn’t complain any more than necessary. He doesn’t give up even when everything seems hopeless, and he does all of this very believably.

Speaking of believable; I don’t know all that much about Mars (personal shortcoming, I am aware), but at the very least this book felt very real, and I know Andy Weir did a fair amount of research to make it as accurate as possible, using existing technology and all that. Still, it doesn’t feel too detailed, to the point where you just have to doubt whether this can actually be true. All in all, he did a really good job with what he wanted to accomplish.

The other characters got a surprising amount of personality as well, considering how they were portrayed, just doing their own thing and kind of trying to help out where they could. If this makes any sense, I'd sum up that The Martian is a feel-good survival science fiction book. I was genuinely touched by how much complete strangers cared and how they wanted to get Mark home, fuzzy feelings and all that.

I don’t think I have anything bad to say about this book, and I really did try to figure something out. It was just really really good, to be honest. It was very geeky and I still read it because it was just so interesting. If anything, the ending left me a bit cold but it was the only single way the book could have possibly ended. Maybe I was just that sad to let it go. I'll definitely read whatever else Andy Weir has written. Did you know that he put the book on Kindle due to high demand, and at the lowest possible price? And that it became a Kindle bestseller after that? This little information makes me really happy.

Be seeing you, probably with Matthew Quick’s Sorta Like a Rock Star – I finished it yesterday but I’m still deciding whether I want to give it three or four stars. Hope you’ll have a great day ‘till then!

PS. My boyfriend told me that I can’t review a book without a Starbucks picture so you’re stuck with these now, sorry not sorry.

PS. That’s my name btw; Iiris is a character from a book I love, if you’ve for some reason been faithfully following these things.