A thoroughly enjoyable second novel, with strong characters and a good alternative setting. Weir goes back to space but manages to achieve something different.

Fast-paced sci-fi-thriller set on the moon with a kickass female protagonist. What more do you want?

Artemis centres around Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara, the wayward daughter of Ammar a master welder on the still nascent but rapidly growning lunar colony of Artemis. It is the second novel by Andy Weir, which, after The Martian which I absolutely adored, I was very much looking forward to reading.

Like The Martian, the story is told in the first person and follows a similar stylistic approach, laced with the same humour and strong scientific focus. It is however very different, as the Artemis colony already consisted of some 2000 individuals at the time the novel is set.

Artemis itself, is supposed to be a bustling place, with a stratified class system. It is a popular destination for very wealthy tourists who are offered the ability to see the Apollo 11 landing site, but it also has its fair share of administrators, blue collar workers and a lower underclass of people just trying to eke out a living. Structurally, it is architected as a series of interconnected domes, each dome forming the natural habitat for the different classes represented.

The story itself begins with Jazz, struggling to make ends meet as a porter and small-time smuggler, who is offered a job which would make her rich beyond her wildest dreams. Of course there are several sizeable catches along the way. Unfortunately the central premise of why Jazz in particular is offered this job, never really seemed satisfying or justified to me, which somewhat unfavourably coloured my impression of the story which followed.

From there, the story itself rapidly turns into fast-paced heist caper which by rights should have made it just as gripping and involving as the Martian. However, there were two things which I think really let the novel down. Firstly, I didn't really like or find Jazz all that convincing as the protagonist. She just seemed to be a bit of a cypher. Obviously brilliant, yet maverick and wilful, she was a bit too cocky and wise-cracking to make the reader warm to her. In contrast to the cocky wise-cracking Mark Watney of The Martian whose mere predicament means that the reader feels instantly sympathetic towards, Jazz just seems like an over-indulged wilful child who manages to get away with entirely too much without suffering from any more serious consequences than a few stern words of admonishment, even when her actions were actually quite serious and criminal in nature. Maybe I'm being a bit a over-critical about this but the actions in the book just didn't seem to be being treated seriously enough and the humour sometimes felt jarring and unnatural.

I also found Artemis itself to be unconvincing, it just seemed to be too constructed - at times it reminded me of the kind of colony which could be built in something like SimCity and consequently was populated by a bunch of one-dimensional Sims. I never got a feeling that there was any substance or coherence to the place - it all just seemed a bit antiseptic and sterile.

All this being said, what redeems the book and where Weir obviously excels, is, as with The Martian, in the technical details, which here for the most part revolve around chemical physics. Weir does an excellent job with the story revolving around two main set pieces, through which he plots a meticulous but thrilling course, interweaving the sciencey bits with some good old-fashioned derring-do and nail-biting suspense. In particular, things really start to hot up in the last quarter of the book which does much to offset some of the less satisfying aspects of the novel.

Overall, although I did enjoy Artemis, I do feel a bit let down as I was really hoping for great things afer something as wonderful as The Martian and ultimately I ended up disappointed.

This hasn't put me off however, and I do look forward to the third novel by Weir, if and when that might be, and hope that he manages to produce something as magical as The Martian.

My first experience with Andy Weir’s writing, his acclaimed The Martian, did not work out well: although the story’s potential was amazing (as testified by the huge success of the movie inspired by the novel), the delivery failed to engage me, and the book ended up in my ‘unfinished’ pile. Still, I’m a great believer in second opportunities, and when the first synopsis for Artemis surfaced, I was intrigued enough to give it a try: this time around, things went a great deal better…

Artemis is the first (and so far the only) organized community on the Moon, a collection of interconnected domes named after famous astronauts: the city, with a resident population of around two thousand people of varied ethnicity, is mostly an industrial settlement and a tourist resort – a place with few written laws and a good number of unwritten ones. Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a young woman of Saudi descent, the daughter of a respected welder she had a falling out with some time prior to the start of the story: Jazz works as a porter, a low-income occupation she uses as a front for her smuggling operations, and it’s because of her non-official job that she becomes involved in an industrial take-over scheme that suddenly morphs into a bloody gang war, turning her into a target for both the police and the members of a ruthless Brazilian cartel.

The pace is lively, carried by Jazz’s mordant, impudent tone, while the city of Artemis comes alive before our eyes thanks to her first-person narrative, whose scientific explanations (clearly the main staple of Andy Weir’s storytelling method) come across as lightly informative rather than pedantic: unlike what happened with Mark Whatney’s voice logs, Jazz ideally talks with the audience rather that at them, and this made a huge difference for me as far as my connection with the character was concerned. The mechanics of living in microgravity, and in a hostile, airless environment, are explained in a discursive manner that makes it sound more like an interesting chat between acquaintances than a pedantic lecture – one of the most fascinating pieces of information being the effect of reduced gravity on the boiling point of water and therefore the temperature (and taste) of hot beverages.

Another characteristic Jazz seems to share with Whatney is her flippancy, with the difference (from my point of view) that with her it works well and it feels natural, an integral part of her psychological makeup, and what's more it suits the character and the situations she finds herself in, while that same cheekiness sounded wrong for Whitney and his dilemma. Moreover, the book’s chapters are interspersed with the mail correspondence Jazz starts as a child with an Earth boy, Kelvin, and through these exchanges we learn much about her back-story without need for lengthy infodumps. There is a not-so-subtle veneer of pain and resentment underlying Jazz’s character, a dark side that she seems to have accepted and makes jokes about, but at the same time you can feel it places her apart from everyone else, a remoteness that seems more a form of defense than a real wish for solitude.

I guess it all boils down to the youthful transgression that caused the rift with her father, an event that still preys heavily on her mind and must be the reason Jazz constantly refuses to employ her remarkable skills to better herself: there are several instances, throughout the book, in which people point at her above-average intelligence and wonder – to her extreme annoyance – why she remains attached to what is essentially a menial job, when she could fare much better with work she’s more skilled at. It’s easy to imagine it might be a form of self-inflicted punishment – unexpressed as it remains – that coupled with her sense of fairness, and her peculiar moral code, quickly endeared her to me despite the brash surface appearance Jazz presents.

Here, though, also lies my main contention with this story: as an independent, self-sustaining woman, Jazz exerts that freedom in many areas of her life, including her sexuality, something that is not at all strange in our present time, nor should it be in the near future period - and frontier location - where Artemis is set, since the absence of Earth-style laws or morals allows that freedom in all its different declinations. As an example of that liberal mindset, we are told about a couple of siblings engaged in an incestuous relationship that chose to emigrate to the Moon to avoid condemnation for their life choices. So, why does practically everyone have to remark on Jazz’s past and present promiscuousness? Why is she targeted as the Red Woman from Babylon, in a place where you can do almost anything as long as you observe strict airlock safety? It’s a small thing, granted, but still it bothered me like an itching nose in a spacesuit…

Still, it’s a very minor quibble, and the story itself more than makes up for it, especially in the breath-stopping (literally…) final segment, where the words “compulsive reading” become quite appropriate. As my second attempt at Andy Weir’s writing, Artemis worked like a charm and the news that it’s already been optioned for a movie picture made me eager to see how this one will translate to the big screen: hopefully they will find an actress that will do Jazz the justice she deserves.

The long awaited follow up to The Martian delivers on the promise displayed there. It's a more traditional story but is a first rate thriller. I'm not a big science fiction reader but this had me hooked from beginning to end. It has the potential to cross over from the sci-fi readership into the mainstream

Welcome to the lunar city of Artemis. Jaz Bashara has lived there since she was six. Her job as a Porter barely pays her rent, so she smuggles in contraband on the side to make ends meet. The police want her deported back to Earth, her father barely speaks to her, her ex shacked up with her best friend. Life isn't exactly a barrel of laughs. When one of her contraband customers offers her the chance of her biggest payday, it's too good to turn down, even though failure would mean being cast back down to Earth in disgrace. What she isn't prepared for, is to be dropped into the middle of a battle to control the city, where choosing the losing side could prove o be fatal.

There was always going to be a weight of expectation with this one, after the success of The Martian, and glad to say he didn't disappoint. It comes with the same caveat of "you don't have to love science, but it helps", however even the technophobes amongst you will be able to follow along, thanks to his no-nonsense way of explaining to through some great characters. Jaz is awesome. Super-smart, but enough of a problem child that she rubs people up the wrong way wherever she goes. Great supporting cast of Svobda, Bob, Dale, Rudy and Jaz's Dad, to name but a few. This was a really visual read for me - I could see it all unfolding as I read, and if this doesn't get snapped up to appear on screen as well I'll be amazed.

7.5/10

How do you follow up a book like "The Martian"? Every aspiring authors dream of a self published phenomenon and also made into an Oscar nominated film. Not bad really, plus it was well written and made science easily accessible to idiots like myself to boot!

So, I repeat. How the chuff do you follow that up?! Well he's certainly given it a good shot with Artemis. It's not in the same league as "The Martian" but there is plenty going on and the excitement ramps up near the end which raised my overall rating. Jazz is a great female lead with enough brains to get her in and out of many scrapes.

There is a decent pace to the book once we get past the first quarter but things were pretty slow to begin with apart from the very opening scene. It's mostly setting up the whole living on moon thing and dropping a bit of backstory for Jazz but it was a bit dry. Then things picked up with plans to take over the world moon and then the last 20% was nonstop which made me rethink my rating.

I enjoyed this overall, it was a little dry to start with but ended with the bang I was hoping for. I see it's already been picked up for a movie so I'll look forward to that shortly.

How do you follow a rock-solid debut hit, such a compelling novel as The Martian? Andy Weir gives it a good effort with Artemis, a clever story of humanity's first colony on the moon, told through the eyes of a morally challenged young woman planning the ultimate oxygen stealing caper! And, is it a further hit or the dreaded sophomore slump? Alas, a bit more the latter. It has its moments of cleverness, an interesting imagining of how life on the moon could be in the near future, with a well-thought, technically grounded vision of what and how it would take to actually set up a city on the moon. However, perhaps because you can't help to compare it to The Martian, it falls a bit flat... particularly the tone of the main character which is meant to sound real and sassy, but just comes across incredibly whiny. Was really looking forward to this one, but The Martian this isn't... maybe an unfair comparison, but sue the author for creating such high expectations following how great his first book was! 3.5 out of 5

In Andy Weir’s new novel, Artemis, everything that can go wrong, does.

Set in the lunar colony, Artemis, we follow the caper of Jazz Bashara - a twenty-six year old smuggler trying to carve out a life and make a buck. When offered a huge payday to sabotage the competitor of a client, the lure of money is too much and Jazz takes the job, only to find herself involved in a much wider conspiracy.

I was so excited for Artemis - The Martian was one of my favourite books of last year, and I absolutely loved Weir’s storytelling style in that book - and yet unfortunately this fell a little flat for me. There were plenty of things that I loved, but just as many things that didn’t work for me as a reader.

Artemis isn’t a bad book - if you like your space-action-adventure novels then this certainly has all of that. There’s a cinematic feel to it, and the way Weir built up the world of the lunar colony felt gritty and real, like it could actually exist. There are as many socio-economic tiers among the many domes that make up Artemis as there are on Earth, and industries are ruled by the nations that immigrated to the moon first and took hold of them. I loved the notion of Moon tourists and the sacredness of the first Moon landing site. I also loved the action sequences (but there’s no surprise there because it’s no secret I love action sequences, the higher the stakes, the better).

Jazz was a real let-down of a character; she felt quite juvenile - which is not a bad thing in and of itself, especially given her circumstances - but I had such a hard time connecting with her. A lot of her comments, behaviour and references were (I believe) supposed to make her appear like a tough and strong female character, but really felt forced. I also felt there were some negative stereotypes being reinforced, in a backhanded way, and that was disappointing.

I wish we got to know more of the side-characters a little better; Jazz was the narrator, and given how self-reliant she was, it made sense that she kept mostly to herself and had a habit of alienating her ‘friends,’ which works as a character trait, but doesn’t really allow for alternative character connections for the reader.

If I wear my for-fun reader hat, it’s not a bad read and there’s definitely enough to keep the casual sci-fi reader engaged. Wearing my more critical hat (which I don’t often pull out), this just pushed a few too many buttons for me to call it a great read. It hasn’t turned me off Weir as a writer - I’m interested to see what he writes next and whether it’s closer to The Martian than Artemis in style. Or maybe something completely different.

I rated Artemis 3 out of 5 stars.

I was so excited to get to read this book! I've been waiting for another Andy Weir story since I finished The Martian and Artemis certainly lived up to expectation!
Slightly slower to get started than The Martian, this book had some significant 'world building' to do in order to properly introduce us to Artemis - the first (and only) city on the moon. This wasn't a bad thing, I loved learning about it, getting to know how it came into being, its society and laws (or lack of in a lot of cases!)
Jazz was another winning character. She was smart, likeable and oh so humanly flawed and capable of making some really bad decisions. For all this you were rooting for her every step of the way.
readers of The Martian will be familiar with some elements of this book - EVA suits and lunar rovers to name a couple, but Artemis ia a whole new story - and well worth a read!

The Martian was freaking incredible so reading Andy Weir had a new book coming out made me hella excited.

The story takes place on Artemis, a new and super cool city on the moon. Our main character is Jazz Bashara, a young Saudi woman. She’s working as porter in Artemis. Well sometimes she’s more of a smuggler. There is nothing Jazz wants more than improve her living standard. So when she gets the chance to earn herself millions of dollar, she accepts a more than questionable offer.
While I thought Jazz was a very interesting character. She made a lot of mistakes in the past and is trying her best to right those. But sometimes I found her character to be lacking.
The other characters weren’t nearly as well written as Jazz. The merely seemed to exist to serve the plot. Although I found one character rather interesting and we don’t even meet him.

I have to admit I didn’t enjoy Artemis as much as I enjoyed The Martian. Nonetheless Artemis was an exciting and fun read.

To those who liked The Martian novel or movie and wonder if the author can do it again: Yes, he does. He delivers the same funny, sly dialogs, the same Hard SF background, the same level of reckless last minute survival action, the same positive minded and intelligent protagonist. 

Only this time, it is different: exchange the male biology astronaut on Mars with a female criminal smuggler on the Moon. A heist gone wrong, an economy thriller and lots of welding in different atmospheres. Of course this is bound to be turned into a movie: The great setting with the different communities in the city of Artemis@Moon, the loveable and believable characters, and of course the accurate science should convince every SF fan who doesn't need doorstoppers or never-ending series. Because this is one of the great features of this novel: it is short, and it is standalone, bringing the plot and the protagonists' fates to a very satisfying ending.

I enjoyed this author's book The Martian, despite the abundance of infodumps (and the annoying habit he has of using an exclamation mark as well as a question mark in the same sentence, which, if I was his editor, I would not allow). This book has the same faults, and many more, but is lacking the main thing I liked about The Martian: a viewpoint character I could really get behind and cheer on to succeed.

Jazz, the viewpoint character in this book, is like Mark Watney in The Martian in that she's a smartass. But while Mark's emphasis is on the smart, Jazz's is definitely on the ass. She tells us three or four times that she makes poor life choices, and demonstrates that this is true even more often; she refuses to fulfil her considerable potential out of, as far as I could tell, immature rebelliousness; she's a petty crook; and her main story goal is to commit major sabotage on vital infrastructure (there is a good reason, but still), while Mark's straightforwardly laudable goal is to survive and escape against the odds.

Artemis is a kind of heist, something I normally enjoy, but for me to enjoy a heist it needs to be more clever than this and pulled off by a lovable rogue - and I just didn't find Jazz lovable. Yes, she has one area of ethical firmness (she will always deliver on a contract), and she eventually acts heroically (to fix something she has broken), but it didn't make up for the other issues with her character. Her arc is that she learns to trust and work with other people, which worked for Lego Batman, but is a bit cheesy here.

She's supposedly Saudi, by the way, but is effectively American. The moonbase is owned by the Kenyans, but is effectively American; all the domes are named after the first American astronauts to land on the moon. None of the nods to cultural diversity were quite believable to me; it all just seemed American. Not to mention that Jazz isn't entirely convincing as a woman, either. Men can write convincing female characters, and Americans can write convincing non-Americans, but it's harder than many people (including most male American writers) seem to think.

The infodumps, too, as well as being annoying in themselves, are sometimes too close to breaking the fourth wall, in that Jazz thinks to explain things that a reader of today would find remarkable but she would not - for example, the lack of a drinking age on the moon. And then there are the ones that are just unnecessarily detailed. "How much do you know about aluminum?" says a character. To myself, I mutter, "As much as I want to. Less than I'm about to."

After all of the dull expository lumps of Space! Science!, the McGuffin seemed to me, as a layperson, to break or at least unconvincingly bend the laws of physics with regard to transmission of light through a non-vacuum. And while there are references to the original American moon landings being about a century before, which places us at least in the 2060s, the technology isn't (apart from the unconvincing McGuffin) anything that we couldn't build today; nothing really seems to have advanced, and the world hasn't changed a great deal.

What really sunk the story for me, though, was the ending. I'm going to have to use spoiler tags here to talk about it in detail.

<spoiler>
Firstly, Jazz screwed up really badly in a way that left several thousand people unconscious, but nobody died. This struck me as unrealistic, but it had to be that way so she didn't get in more trouble than she already was.

Secondly, and more fatally for my suspension of disbelief, in order to keep from being deported to a miserable life of gravity sickness on Earth, she makes a deal that she couldn't realistically make, using an argument that defies how economics works. She claims that the base administrator is better off with her, a known smuggler with principles who doesn't bring in weapons or hard drugs, than with the smugglers who would bring those things - who she's supposedly driven out of business by undercutting their prices. But if someone isn't supplying what you want, their prices are irrelevant; you'll go to someone who will supply it. Jazz has no realistic way of preventing anyone else from smuggling anything they want, so her deal is pure bluff, and the administrator - an economist - would know it.

Oh, and the nerd gets the girl. This is annoying enough as a trope when the nerd is the protagonist; but when the girl is the protagonist, and the nerd hasn't really done a lot, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the nerd gets the girl because the author is a nerd and thinks nerds should get more sexy girls, as of right. At one point, Jazz thinks about how to reward the nerd for helping her with something, and "have sex with him" is one of the options she considers. Which is all kinds of offensive.
</spoiler>

So the author writes himself into a scenario where, by all logic, the main character would be in a near-fatal amount of trouble, and gets her off by fudging severely and, to me, unconvincingly.

Overall, I thought this book caught fire on the launchpad. It didn't succeed in terms of craft, character, plot, or setting. I give it three stars only because it's amusing in places, and occasionally clever.

I received a copy from Netgalley for review.

I was really looking forward to this book, having loved The Martian, and I wasn’t disappointed.
This time, we are on the moon, in a city called Artemis, housed in a series of enormous “bubbles”, named after various astronauts.

Jazz (Jasmine) Bashara is a very bright woman, who scrapes a living as a porter, delivering items to people, with a little contraband on the side.
She wants to become an EVA master so that she can take tourists outside the domes, and make more money because she has a big debt to repay.
When a rich resident makes her an offer of a lot of money for a very risky venture, she jumps at the chance. Unsurprisingly, the venture goes wrong and she finds herself deeper and deeper in trouble as she tries to repay her debt, until things are resolved in a thrilling climax.

We get the obligatory science, about how life on the moon is achieved, the economic setup, and how Jazz plans and executes her daring attack, which I am sure is very sound, and I found interesting enough not to detract from the narrative.

I really enjoyed the story of Jazz, and all the amazing characters in her life, Bob the EVA master, Dale her ex-friend, the scientist Svoboda, Rudy the Mountie, Jaz’s lovely father. And Kelvin, her penfriend on Earth.

Thanks to Netgalley and Ebury Publishing for the opportunity to read this book.

Artemis. It’s a new stand alone from Andy Weir, whose first novel, The Martian, was a masterclass in producing an engaging and accessible work of sci-fi whilst also getting the science bit right. It later got made into a rather good film with Matt Damon. So Artemis has some rather large shoes to fill.
So, what is Artemis? It’s…a few things, actually. The top of which is, it’s heist story. On the moon. It’s not just that, of course. The protagonist, Jasmine (“Jazz”) Bashara is being offered an opportunity to change her life – and we’ll get on to that shortly. What I’m saying is that, though this is a heist story, one where careful planning and unexpected reversals are the order of the day, it’s also a story about a woman looking to make something of herself, and the book is as much about character and personality as it is about chases through vacuum and dubious law enforcement.

The world – well, it’s in some ways familiar, in others…less so. The moon is a harsh place, at least externally. It’s cold, dead, and the slightest mistake could kill you. There’s a certain sterile beauty to it, to be fair – but Weir has built a moon which can kill, and emphasises the fragility of life in that environment. The larger part of the world, though, is in the city which humanity has settled. It has a certain retro vibe to it – domes rising out of the moonrock, habitable areas underground as well as above. Relatively small, the cultural cadences of science and technology are interspersed throughout – this is a people who make up for their lack of numbers with intellectual capital and skill. The city bustles and thrives, and the industry around it – aluminium, for example – helps sustain it; it certainly feels both alive, and familiar – and at the same time, ever so slightly strange.

Character-wise – well, the main focus is on Jasmine. I have a lot of affection for Jazz, as she’s known – a smart-mouthed young woman, with a laser-like intelligence and an impressive facility for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, or otherwise putting her proverbial foot in it. Still, she has a sharp tone, and a degree of hustle and charm which it’s a lot of fun to read along with. We pick up some of her history through the text. This lets us explore wider issues as well, like how parenting, or nationality work on the moon, or the role of currency in the context of moon-living. Jazz is energetic and cheerfully self-serving, and if there’s hints of larger issues there – guilt, issues with authority, family difficulties – then they help make a more nuanced character.

Jazz is backed up by a fairly large ensemble cast – from snide EVA instructors who also happen to be ex-boyfriends, to seemingly baffled scientists. Jazz’s father, a man seemingly confounded by his daughter’s ability to do absolutely anything other than apply herself, steals every scene that he’s in, with a combination of pragmatic competence and an obvious love for his daughter that pours off the page. There’s others of course – engineers in life support, and a particularly persistent lawman. I think my only complaint is that we don’t see enough of them. They’re there, and serve the plot rather well, and give Jazz the contrasts and banter in her life that we need to see – but I’d love to have seen them in more depth.

The plot…well, as usual, no spoilers. But it’s a lot of fun. In some ways it’s a slow burn, as facets of a plan come together. But there’s enough going on at every stage to keep you turning the pages. When things do kick off, then there’s heart-in-mouth moments aplenty, tension broken with chases, brawls, and the occasional explosion. It’s a journey in exuberant prose, which is taking joy in both the science and discovery of it all, and in the personal dramas, the horrible mistakes, the bare-knuckle recoveries and the personal triumphs.

It’s not The Martian, but that’s a good thing. Artemis is strong enough to stand on its own. It’s clever, fast-paced, tense, and carries moments of sparkling humour and emotional weight. If you were a fan of The Martian, then yes, you should give this one a read. If you’re coming to Weir’s work for the first time – this is very much worth the time.

After the phenomenal success of ‘The Martian’ how on Earth (cough!) was Weir going to live up to it? Maybe moving a little closer to home perhaps: this time around the action is set on the Moon-based city of Artemis; a series of interconnected bubbles right out of 1950’s boy’s comic, the Eagle’s, Dan Dare!

Weir describes the set-up of Artemis in some detail from the bubbles, named After the Apollo mission astronauts, to the life support systems and the people who run the place, from the EVA Guild masters – the experts who accompany ‘tourists’ on lunar mini-expeditions right up to the Administrator, who ensures it all runs smoothly. Our heroine is one ‘Jazz’ Bashara, a twenty-something of Saudi Arabian heritage who ‘works’ as a smuggler and just about scrapes along on her illicit gains. She is trying to save up enough money to go for the EVA Guild Master certification, when she is offered a ‘business’ proposition by one of Artemis’ resident billionaires.

How this plays out and who it affects constitutes the story. Just as in The Martian, all the science checks out: it is all plausible and doesn’t contravene any of the laws of science. But for this reader, at least, it doesn’t have what made the debut novel so compelling, the clear and present danger of Mark Watney’s dreadful predicament as the basis for great dollops of science education.

So, it makes for an okay read but I wouldn’t describe it as a page turner: second novel syndrome strikes again, I’m afraid!

Jazz is a criminal...

Jazz is an aspirational young woman trying to make ends meet...

Jazz is a product of the society she grew up in…

Jazz is an essential member of her society…

Andy Weir’s eagerly anticipated follow up to The Martian does not fail to deliver.

Jazz is a woman in her mid 20’s who has lived on the moon since the age of 6. Following a fall out with her dad she earns a meagre living as a porter whilst smuggling contraband for some of the wealthier Artemis residents. Jazz takes on what appears to be the perfect crime but soon finds herself caught up in a plot to control the future of the colony.

Artemis is not only a fun heist with science bits, it’s also an interesting exploration of how a society really works. Think Ocean’s Eleven meets the game Civilisation, in space!

This is really Jazz’s story and she narrates with a wonderfully sassy and sarcastic style. I loved that there is a diverse cast of supporting characters and it’s great to see a strong young female character take centre stage.

I really enjoyed the book but there was a little too much scientific description for me in places. At the point when the heist is taking place the pace really slowed down as we’re told in great detail how welding works in space and so on. However, like The Martian, it’s this attention to detail that really adds credibility to the story and so this is just a minor and personal point.

Artemis is a fun, roller-coaster adventure with a great cast of characters. Highly recommended.

No hint of the difficult second book here - fabulous from start to finish with a strong, believable female lead. This was a real caper set on the moon and I found it a great thriller and an utter page turner. Great additions of science to the narrative which were explained within the text plausibly. I liked the character progression too,

Artemis is the new book from Andy Weir that is due out 14th November 2017, I was lucky enough to be given the chance due to Netgalley and Penguin Random House UK / Ebury Publishing to read an advanced copy.

Artemis follows Jazz Bashara who lives on the first and only city on the Moon. The place was built for rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire, which Jazz is not one of. She is one of the working class people who help keep Artemis running. Her job of a porter doesn't pay well so she smuggles in some contraband on the side to help pay her bills.

Jazz is a small time criminal,  who is given the chance to make a lot of money to commit the perfect crime. The perfect crime isn't easy to pull off, and she has stepped into the middle of a battle for control of Artemis, now her only chance to survive is to pull off a bigger and more complex crime than before.

The story was amazing, Artemis is a non-stop and the story went into a direction I would never of guessed. The book also parts of the story gave me the Ocean 11 feeling which I loved.

This is the first book that I have read that the description of the location where Jazz lives and it made me feel claustrophobic.  I am not normally claustrophobic in real life but I couldn't live there.

Jazz as a character is really interesting, you immediately warm to her. Jazz is funny, smart and sarcastic, she has a mouth that will get her into trouble.  In the book focus on the current storyline but we have an email conversation between Jazz and a friend back on earth called Kelvin where we find out more about Jazz past and how she ends up in this situation.

This book is a must read for the year.

I give this book 5 out of 5

The Martian has become one of my favourite books, so Artemis had a lot to live up to. Andy Weir’s combination of great story telling and accurate science/technical details is very appealing to me.
The story itself was interesting and kept a fast pace all the way through. Would thoroughly recommend (I already have infact) and will definitely read again once it is released. It’s not quite beaten the Martian for me, but maybe after a few more reads it will be onto my favourites shelf.
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