The Deal of the Artemis

If you're an author whose debut novel is a wild success, I'd imagine the temptation is overwhelming to follow it up with more of the same. It's a high-class problem to have, to be sure -- one that faced Andy Weir, the author of the runaway hit The Martian, as he wrote his latest book, Artemis.

With just one other book to compare to, many readers will surely have different notions about what Weir should or shouldn't have tried to change about his "formula." I feel like his brand was clearly putting as much science into his science fiction as possible, and that was perfect for him. Check that box with Artemis -- it's set in the future on a lunar base, and it's peppered with all sorts of fun facts about the moon and what it would be like to live there.

Smart people solving problems is a core element of The Martian that Weir preserved in Artemis. But here, he tried to disrupt his formula with his cast of characters. The main character of Artemis is Jazz Bashara, and seems calculated to be very different from The Martian's Mark Watney. Jazz is female, has a Muslim father (though she herself is atheist), and uses her ingenuity in a far less heroic way -- she's a criminal running a low-key smuggling operation for the local population of the lunar base.

Jazz is emblematic of a clear effort at diversity by Weir, one that permeates this new book. Jazz's Muslim father is an important secondary character. So is her ex-boyfriend, Dale, whose relationship with Jazz fell apart when he came out as gay. The future moon base was built by a space agency in Kenya, and its current "mayor"/administrator hails from there. The "bad guys" of the story are a Brazilian crime syndicate.

But most of this diversity feels only skin deep. Jazz's criminal tendencies are a key differentiator, to be sure, but in basically every other way, she's Mark Watney, Weir's first starring character. She's sarcastic under pressure, clever and inventive, often crass and always suspicious of authority. She tells her story in the first person. Weir has to remind us on a fairly regular basis that she's female, because her "voice" is very much Mark Watney's. (His voice, presumably.) And, as in The Martian, the secondary characters have almost no personality to speak of, beyond being "lesser Mark Watneys" (smart but less so, witty but less so).

That's not to say the book isn't fun. It certainly is. The plot is substantially different, while being the same type of puzzle-oriented page turner as The Martian. I found it a quick, breezy read, and I did like it overall. But it also had essentially the same flaws as The Martian. That didn't keep me from enjoying that book, nor did it keep that book from being a monster hit that spawned an Oscar-nominated, financially-successful movie. Still, I'd hoped Artemis would show an evolution of Weir's writing skills, and it doesn't really do that.

I suppose Weir could turn out several more books like this, and it would probably take a few before I'd tire of the formula. He's no Dan Brown. Yet there are diminishing returns here. I'd give Artemis a B, and probably a recommendation. But I'll probably regard Andy Weir's third book, when it comes, with a bit more skepticism.