Artemis by Andy Weir Review

In space, no-one can hear you yawn…

I try to include plot summaries at the top of my reviews for context but I can’t do it for Fartemis - every time I think about this trash my mind collapses out of exhausted, frustrated, sheer boredom! The protagonist is a smuggler called Jazz Bashara. It’s set on the moon city of Fartemis. There’s a laughable half-assed “heist” plot. Oh, and I fucking haaaated reading it! AARRGH, GET IT AWAY FROM MEEEE!

To be fair, I didn’t like Andy Weir’s last novel, The Martian, so I probably should’ve known better. But I wanted to give this writer another shot to try and see what everyone else does – mebbe now he somehow got good? NOPE. This is one author I’ll never read again!

Jazz is a Muslim for diversity reasons only. Because she doesn’t act or talk like a Muslim woman nor does her religion or ethnicity play any part in the story. Same for Fartemis being run by South Africa – no reason why, just diversity! It feels all the more contrived given that the culture feels American and all the calculatingly diverse characters talk like Americans.

And let’s talk about the cheeseball dialogue because Jazz’s voice is SO ANNOYING. It’s an amalgam of conflicting nonsense. Jazz is supposedly a 26 year old woman who for some reason talks like a 14 year old boy cracking forced cringey middle-aged dad jokes – coincidentally like 45 year old Andy Weir! She’s the least convincing female character I’ve read in some time.

At no point was I at all interested in the convoluted “heist” plot. Sabotage this thing, work for this gangster, fight this gangster, double-cross, yawn, oh god, why won’t this book end… The story unfolds predictably with the usual eye-rolling cliffhangers you find in junky books like this. There are interstitial (FILLER!) chapters featuring Jazz’s pen pal which were totally irrelevant. And, like in The Martian, there are far too many overly technical passages full of (probably) real science that was immensely dull to read – this is a novel, not an engineering manual, Andy! The laughable “action” at the end revolves around welding, which is as tedious as it sounds. In fact, it reads like a novel written by the book’s autistic character, Svoboda!

I’ll give Weir that basing the currency around weight and some of the world-building is clever but I can’t say I enjoyed reading any aspect of this at any time so it easily earned the lowest rating possible. Fartemis is the complete package – of shit: a trashy YA novel full of uninteresting characters, an unexciting, forgettable plot, bad dialogue and an annoying lead all bundled up in pedantic sci-fi. Readers who enjoyed shite like Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter, Ernest Cline’s Armada, and Pierce Brownpants’ Red Rising will probably dig this but otherwise I’d recommend Fartemis to no-one, anywhere, ever!