Review: Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I am not impressed. For multiple reasons. I'm not so sure that quitting a career in software engineering and becoming a full-time writer was such a wise move for Andy Weir. The Martian is gorgeous. I read it twice and it's still gorgeous. Technical enough, interesting enough, believable enough. I know the author wants his heroes to solve problems they themselves created and it's executed brilliantly in the Martian. Here? I think it went well overboard. That last part about poisoning the whole city? Was it really necessary? Besides, this is where it becomes not so believable. I'm afraid in real life there would be casualties. Someone was bound to die. Like the toddler our hero passes in a corridor. And not just this one, but all the children actually. Lower body mass, same concentrations....

The whole set up feels false somehow. I'm willing to bet the author grew up in a big city. And he doesn't even know what he doesn't know. He tries to apply his personal social experience on a situation where it's not applicable. The whole Artemis is about 2000 people. Tourists come and go, but there are two thousand residents. Have you ever visited villages with two thousand people in them? Everybody knows everybody. And when I say knows I don't mean just faces and/or names. People living in small communities know pretty much everything about each other. The most anti-social person there would be more connected (and protected) than an average outgoing human being in a big city. Our hero is not the most anti-social one, she can't be. It takes a lot of communication skills to be a smuggler. Yet she somehow driven everyone else out of the profession and at the same time has troubles managing customs. She also lived almost all her life there and can come up with only a handful of friends, all of whom are in a some kind of a relationship crisis with her. So now we have a successful smuggler, a very socially-oriented profession, who somehow doesn't talk with anybody.... Yep, totally believable.

View all my reviews