Jason Pettus's Reviews > Artemis

2024 reads, #14. DID NOT FINISH. I tolerated Andy Weir's debut novel back when it first came out, 2011's The Martian (my review), but I can't say that I actually liked it; and that's because, as a so-called "hard science-fiction" author, Weir is both incapable of creating complex characters or believable dialogue, and has no interest in doing so, believing as he does that a novel doesn't need pesky things like interesting characters or believable dialogue if you have math equations! That would've usually led to me never reading another Weir novel ever again, but when a copy of his follow-up, 2017's Artemis, showed up in my neighborhood's Little Free Library the other week, I was just too tempted and second-guessed myself, picking it up and trying to read it this weekend. Note to self: Stop second-guessing yourself, Jason! Unfortunately this was exactly as terrible as I suspected it was going to be, mostly because Weir finally does try to create compelling characters and realistic dialogue in this book, getting things so cartoonishly wrong that the novel ends up reading like a high-school creative writing assignment from a dimwitted 14-year-old, and accidentally setting back race relations an entire generation by his embarrassing "I'm actually secretly a straight white male" depiction of a woman of color as the book's main character. (How can you tell that a woman of color character has been written by a straight white male? Well, if in the first 25 pages, she gives her personal carrier a man's name because it's "big and strong," literally says [using these exact words], "What's wrong with hookers?" and describes the chiseled-jaw Aryan acting as the Moon's sheriff "Hitler's wet dream" and then immediately confesses she has an enormous crush on him...it's a pretty good freaking bet.) A classic case of failing upwards, Weir's novels are just getting worse and worse, yet are securing bigger and bigger Hollywood deals (his newest novel just got acquired by Ryan Gosling), so take that as the dire warning to any actual intelligent readers that I mean it as.