Artemis - Andy Weir
This book sure is easy reading for hard sci-fi. It's a quick jaunt of a thriller on the Moon, filled with murder, mobs, and museums. The story follows Jazz Bashara as she wheels and deals her way towards financial independence - and gets caught up in space shenanigans on the way.
The first thing that struck me is how satisfyingly diverse the people are on Andy Weir's lunar colony of Artemis. Of course, having a brown protagonist helps - it's not often I get to identify directly with the main characters in sci-fi. But beyond that, Weir goes to quite a lot of effort to include people who look and live in all sorts of ways; the characters are not stereotyped, and the white people are not the "default" person. It is refreshing.
The other big thing is that this book is not as exciting or edge-of-your-seat as The Martian. It builds more slowly, and spends plenty of time fully exploring the concept of a colony on the Moon, even while tossing the main character into an escalating sequence of dicey situations. Where The Martian is much more of a survival thriller, this book is, to a large extent, an exposition of the various technologies and, excitingly, economies, that would be required for humans to survive in space. Where sci-fi can often focus on space heroes working in perfectly-functional spacecraft on manicured planets, this book is much grungier, dealing with hacked-together tech and societies. So, paired with the thoroughly-researched underlying science is a deeply human story about just how damn hard it is to stay alive without an atmosphere or a magnetic field.
Perhaps the best comparison to this book is The Expanse series. Certainly, Artemis is much harder, but the thrill level and space poverty neatly match. Certainly it would be no surprise if this book were set in that universe.
Overall, Andy Weir has delivered another satisfying technological exploration, and it makes me hope dearly that space tourism becomes a thing in my lifetime.
The first thing that struck me is how satisfyingly diverse the people are on Andy Weir's lunar colony of Artemis. Of course, having a brown protagonist helps - it's not often I get to identify directly with the main characters in sci-fi. But beyond that, Weir goes to quite a lot of effort to include people who look and live in all sorts of ways; the characters are not stereotyped, and the white people are not the "default" person. It is refreshing.
The other big thing is that this book is not as exciting or edge-of-your-seat as The Martian. It builds more slowly, and spends plenty of time fully exploring the concept of a colony on the Moon, even while tossing the main character into an escalating sequence of dicey situations. Where The Martian is much more of a survival thriller, this book is, to a large extent, an exposition of the various technologies and, excitingly, economies, that would be required for humans to survive in space. Where sci-fi can often focus on space heroes working in perfectly-functional spacecraft on manicured planets, this book is much grungier, dealing with hacked-together tech and societies. So, paired with the thoroughly-researched underlying science is a deeply human story about just how damn hard it is to stay alive without an atmosphere or a magnetic field.
Perhaps the best comparison to this book is The Expanse series. Certainly, Artemis is much harder, but the thrill level and space poverty neatly match. Certainly it would be no surprise if this book were set in that universe.
Overall, Andy Weir has delivered another satisfying technological exploration, and it makes me hope dearly that space tourism becomes a thing in my lifetime.
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