To tourists from Earth, Artemis is the pinnacle of science, humanity's first permanent colony on the moon, but to Jazz it's just home - the only one she's known,
having left Saudi Arabia with her father when she was just six. Despite the exotic location, it's not so different from small towns everywhere, not even big enough
to warrant a full police force. As a porter running a smuggling business on the side, this suits Jazz just fine. She's never done much more illegal than importing
the odd box of cigars for wealthy clients - but when one of those clients approaches her about a major caper, with a proportionately major fee, she decides to stretch
her skill set a bit.
Big mistake.
What looked like a fairly simple, if risky, task soon has her on the run from a hired killer, part of a tangled scheme that reaches into the highest echelons of power.
If she's going to get out of this alive, she has to figure out just what she's stumbled into before it endangers all of Artemis. If they thought she'd disappear
quietly, though, they picked the wrong smuggler; Jazz may have burned many bridges in her life, even with her own father, but one thing she won't do is turn her back
on her home.
Review
Like Weir's debut novel, The Martian, this tale is riddled with deep science. Much of the story depends on it, from the chemical process of smelting aluminum
to the trick of welding in a vacuum. Unlike The Martian, however, I didn't enjoy spending my time with the novel's main character. Jazz is admittedly a screw-up
and a slacker who has brought many of her problems down on her own head through sheer petty stubbornness, but I'm never given much of a reason to understand her or
sympathize with her; she's just a largely unpleasant human who annoys and uses the people who think to call her friend, deliberately wasting her life because nobody's
going to tell her what to do. Her main motivation is greed, pure and simple; I didn't get much sense of humanity underneath her tough exterior, despite some later lip
service to learning a lesson about taking people for granted. For that matter, the other characters tend to come across as fairly flat, if generally more relatable; this
may be a side effect of being forced to view things through Jazz's frankly bratty point of view. The smart aleck attitude that worked for Mark Watney is less successful
here; that may be because Mark was largely talking to himself, while Jazz unloads several of her barbs on other people, so what was a somewhat-endearing reaction to
extreme stress in one event comes across as deliberately hurtful in the other.
Anyway, this story has been described as a lunar heist novel. That's generally the gist of the plot, though it's interrupted frequently with science lessons. These are
generally too short to qualify as infodumps, though the cumulative effect is similar (especially when, as noted, I wasn't that fond of the main character/narrator.) An
excess of side characters, pulled into the unfolding fiasco to various degrees, tangle the plot at times. Jazz messes up, more often than not through a failure to account
for the human factor of the equation (not surprising, given her evident inability to form a normal relationship), eventually having to assemble a team of misfits (a genre
prerequisite) to strike back. It moves decently, though once in a while the tale clunks on certain plot points - there's a tendency to monologuing by more than one player
in this game - and the team doesn't mesh quite as well as a good heist team ought to. (This isn't helped by Jazz, who keeps picking on the scabs of old wounds with the
people who are risking their necks to help her.)
Ultimately, it's not a bad story. Fans of hard science fiction will enjoy the many little details of lunar living and the capers involved, and there are some nice, intense
moments of lunar peril. It's the human side where this one fell down (as I lack the general intelligence for deep science to be interesting on its own.) Had Jazz been a
little less snarky (or had given me a reason to really understand how she became that way, other than having been a teenager at some point in her life - it really is like
she got mentally and emotionally stuck at sixteen), I think I would've enjoyed it more.
Six astronauts came to the red planet with the Ares 3 mission. Only five left. A catastrophic dust storm threatened their return vessel,
prompting an emergency mission abort - only the storm caught Mark Watney and swept him away from his companions. They had no choice but to leave
without his body.
But Mark survived. And now he's alone, without a working radio, stranded with a habitat and supplies that were only meant to last for a 31-day
mission. If he means to live until the next Mars mission arrives - four years out - he'll have to do some heavy adaptation.
Fortunately, astronauts have a reputation for on-the-fly thinking.
Unfortunately, on Mars, any mistake could be his last.
Review
It's been a while since a book pulled me into a reading binge like The Martian did. Starting fast, with a man in a crisis of otherworldly
proportions, it pulls the reader into an absorbing tale of disaster, triumphs, and catastrophes. Real-world science plays heavily into Mark's story,
and the efforts of NASA and the world (including his Ares 3 crewmates) to concoct a one-of-a-kind rescue mission across interplanetary space,
but it never overwhelms the reader; Weir delivers it in bite-sized chunks for us educationally-challenged folks, with layperson summaries that don't
belittle or diminish the core ideas. Remarkably, Weir also manages to build very human characters, as the whole story would fall flat if nobody cared
about the people involved. Even as Mark copes with the raw data and the odd disaster, he deals with the sheer isolation and boredom of his unintended
exile using humor (and a fair bit of well-justified cursing)... not to mention raiding leftovers from his crewmates in search of entertainment. This
kind of balance between hard science and human interest is a tricky feat indeed, but Weir pulls it off brilliantly here. That, plus the fast pace and
many nail-biting moments, not to mention its aforementioned power to drag me into binge reads, earn it a solid five-star rating.
Dr. Ryland Grace wakes on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, let alone why he's there at all. Two corpses are
all that remains of the rest of the crew. When he discovers that the nearest star isn't the sun he's known all his life,
things get even stranger... but as fragmentary memories surface, he realizes just how dire his situation is.
It all started when the sun began dimming inexplicably. When the culprit was discovered to be a form of microscopic life
entirely unlike anything seen on Earth, a top team of experts recruited Ryland - once a prominent scientist who wrote a
controversial thesis on hypothetical extraterrestrial life possibilities, now a middle school teacher who shuns academia - to
study the "Astrophage" and, hopefully, find a cure before reduced sunlight triggers a mass extinction event. But he was never
supposed to be out here alone, especially not with fragmented memories.
Then he sees the flare of another engine, and he learns that he's not as alone as he thought he was... nor is Earth the only
world in danger.
