Lost in a Good Book

Published: 14th November 2017
Publisher: Broadway Books
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
Genre: Science Fiction
★   ★   ★  – 3 Stars

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she’s stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.

As someone who ADORED The Martian almost to a serious fault, I was disappointed this didn’t live up to the same feeling. Once I adjusted my expectations and stopped trying to compare it to The Martian, I enjoyed the story. Pushing past that barrier proved extremely difficult because I found myself constantly thinking back to Weir’s other work which, not only is unfair to him, but unfair to my reading experience. I kept expecting it to feel the same, to have the same likeable characters, and the same awe inspiring world.

Jazz is a character who is who normally doesn’t get up to too much trouble herself, she merely aides the illegalities of others. She is clever, too clever for what she is doing but she is stubborn and doesn’t listen when people tell her she has great potential. One of her clear character “charms” is that she is continuing her teenage rebelling well into her twenties which is something you have to get used to because it gets on your nerve a bit. I kept forgetting how old she was meant to be with her behaviour sometimes, but taken with the perspective of her whole story and experience it is slightly forgivable.

Some of Weir’s justifications for her behaviour and relationships was a bit thin, a stolen boyfriend at 17 causes a 10 year rift between friends, and a strange jealously of a fellow co-worker adds to her childish nature as well. There is nothing wrong with having an unlikable character, my only concern was that she was meant to be likeable on some level and it hasn’t hit that mark at all. But character assessment aside, once you accept who she is as a character you can focus more on the story around her.

My interest increased when I realised it was to become somewhat of a mystery. I liked the detective aspect and the problems that needed to be solved. I enjoyed the challenges Jazz faced, especially being in the unique situation of being on the moon. It added new problems and barriers, and it allowed Weir to introduce us more to this world he had created. The only downside was I felt the language was repetitive, and the delivery of information wasn’t always as seamless and natural as it could have been.

Weir has created a great world, one that works in a believable manner. It is futuristic while being grounded in a known reality, combined with a long held science fiction premise: a society on the moon with people who visit, people who live there, and people who are born there. His complicated world construction is aided once again by maps to help you picture the location of everything  and get a sense of this futuristic location with logistics about the day to day life explained through plot points and exposition. The science once again came across as realistic and plausible. It didn’t feel quite so seamless and natural as The Martian, but that might have something to do with the story structure itself. Instead of Watney writing his journal and explaining his process in that form, Jazz tells us her own story in first person and it feels clunky and at times unnatural.

I know it sounds like I didn’t enjoy it but that’s not true. I didn’t love it, but I liked it and I liked the story Weir told. The plot went beyond just a space story and it shows that people will always be people no matter their circumstance or location. There was mystery and intrigue, and there was clever science that I really enjoyed learning about and seeing put into practice.

I quite liked the ending, I think Weir redeemed himself with how he handled the final chapters. There is intrigue, mysteries, and the suspense of things not going to plan. I’d gotten used to Jazz by the end and while I actually thought there were going to be a few more surprises I enjoyed the ending. It made sense for the journey we’d been on and the story Weir was trying to tell.

You can purchase Artemis via the following

Book Depository | QBD

Dymocks | Fishpond | Booktopia

Amazon | Amazon Aust

Angus & Robertson