[Poll Ballot] Artemis - 3 stars

[forsanolim]

3.5 stars, rounding down: Jazz lives on Artemis, the world's first moon colony, where she earns side money as a smuggler of goods from Earth to the Moon. When one of her clients offers her the chance to become involved in a crime that would, if successful, dramatically change her fragile financial existence and reshape Artemis's society in a fundamental way, she's quick to say yes. But when starting out on this con of a lifetime, she has no idea how deeply entangled she will become in the surprisingly dark underside of her relatively small Moon community.

I really enjoyed the Martian, but I'd held off on reading this for a while because I knew that this plot didn't sound as interesting to me--and I was right on that point, though I am happy that I got around to reading this. The pacing of this book definitely accelerates continually throughout. I very nearly put the book down around a quarter of the way through, because I wasn't the biggest fan of Jazz's narration and I wasn't sure where the plot was going to go. It definitely picked up after that, though, and I found the plot increasingly interesting. I again really enjoyed Weir's ability to add a lot of technical detail, and I found Jazz a really smart and capable heroine, though as mentioned I sometimes found her narration ("The city shined in the sunlight like a bunch of metallic books. What? I'm not a poet. They look like boobs.") a bit annoying, and there were a couple things (for example, (view spoiler)[though Jazz mentions the large payout to be a major reason why she agreed to the con, she mentions at the end of the book that T. Landvik probably never would have given her the money in any case (hide spoiler)]) that I felt pushed the boundaries of plausibility (even in a science fiction story set on the moon).

[David]

Nice review.

[Karin]

I've heard that his book is a disappointment for many who like The Martian, so I haven't read it. I may have even taken it off my want to read shelf as well.