It took Andy Weir, whom our translators diligently call Weir, six years to understand that he does not want to be a reader, but wants to be a writer. At first, the literary, and then the cinematic success of "The Martian", in principle, did not even allow for another outcome, so meet Artemis, the new creation of the dude who once sent Mark Watney to Mars to grow potatoes.
Before talking about the plot and the characters, it is important to know a couple of facts about "Artemis": firstly, the novel is clearly the first in some kind of trilogy-trilogy about the lunar city and its quite earthly inhabitants, secondly, its adaptation has already been taken up, so if something from the plot will still be interesting to you, and reading for some reason is a break, then you can well wait for the film, scoring on the book. In this case, this is quite a normal option, by the way.
The year 2080 is a relatively near future, I even plan to live. Earthlings built a small underground town on the Moon with a population of 2 thousand people, called Artemis (it is quite logical, considering that the American lunar program was called Apollo, and this mythical maiden is his sister).
The city trades in two ways - tourism, because everyone wants to look at the lunar craters and try sex in conditions of 1/6 of the earth's gravity, and aluminum mining, for which there is even a small factory here, at the same time providing the city with oxygen.
As the heroine of "Artemis" we get 26-year-old Jazmin "Jazz" Bashara (again translation difficulties, of course, in the Russian version this name is Jasmine, like an oriental princess), a smuggler courier, stuck in adolescence and dreaming of someday getting rich and getting a home that will fit something other than a bed.
The main trouble with Artemis is that Andy Weir, unfortunately, did not come up with a plot for his novel at all, he just figured that it would be interesting to describe an Earth colony on the Moon and how it generally exists and looks. And he did it really cool, it was interesting to read about the structure and functioning of Artemis, although, of course, you often catch yourself thinking that it is unlikely that everything in reality would look like Weir described, at least at the time he described, while the lunar city is still a curiosity, and not something familiar and living by itself.
I personally liked not even some technical descriptions, from the category of how oxygen is supplied, and how many doors you need to go through in a spacesuit to get into the space where it can finally be removed, but fragments of a social model that is simultaneously borrowed from the Middle Ages and from some science fiction novels of the sixties of the last century.
But everything else is a disaster, a primitive and the use of instructions for use as inspiration for writing a literary text. I don't even want to briefly describe the plot, I'll give you a thesis on what to expect from Artemis, and I'm sure you'll already understand everything: the South American cartel, the lunar mafia, the raider seizure of the plant, welding in the conditions of the lunar surface, shooting chases.
Including in a spacesuit, guilt towards parents, a couple of corpses, a gay friend, a geek in love, a few unfunny jokes about a reusable condom (someone tell Weier that a joke repeated three times does not become three times funnier). It all looks like a plot for a very bad computer quest, in which the player has to press the key as quickly as possible so that his character, a lunar settler, finally lowers the lever or turns the screw.
And then he went and took himself a new "mission" in which he would need to get somewhere in a big hamster ball, launch a drone or make a hole in some metal surface. Moreover, the dialogues within the whole action also look like phrases from a bad computer game that you have to listen to over and over again if you fail the task and have to start all over again: well, you know, sometimes screenshots with such phrases even become memes.
The lack of a coherent plot in this case could be smoothed out by only one thing - colorful characters, but, alas, they are not observed here either. In general, even on "The Martian" it was noticeable that the psychology of the characters and the use of non-template types is clearly not Weyer's forte, the writer sets himself the task of constantly showing some kind of role model, a cheerful and superficial hero who throws jokes, jokes, like my tipsy uncle on any family holiday.
In this case, there is a 26-year-old girl from Saudi Arabia with a technical mindset, who is given everything by one left, despite the fact that she behaves like a teenager, irritates a good half of the characters, and, in principle, is initially presented as a pathological loser. Any piece of the puzzle - age, origin, gender, can be easily changed, so it does not play a role in the overall picture.
As for the rest, the author did not bother at all, you can stick a brand with an inscription from one word on any character and you will already understand who is needed here and what his function is (sentimental family ties, love, friendship, eternal confrontation, etc.), moreover, sometimes I see Andy Weyer coming up with another hero: "so, so, and who will send the heroine contraband from Earth if she doesn't know anyone there? I'll come up with an earthly pen pal for her, who will work on loading shuttles going to the moon! Let him be... Kevin! From Kenya!".
As a result, I read a book for a couple of days, most of which is a description of how to properly do welding if you are on the Moon, which valves should and should not be turned at the aluminum plant in Artemis, and other technical nuances related to the world invented by the author.
Page after page, the heroine solved the technical problems that arose before her, casually saving the entire settlement and establishing social ties that she herself had once destroyed, and I yawned and covered my mouth with my hand, thinking what kind of bestseller you can pick up from the instructions for connecting the washing machine or inspiringly describing how to change the gasket in the kitchen roll with one hand.
No, there were also a lot of technical details in "The Martian", and they were not always interesting, but at the same time I personally worried about the hero, reading how he copes with this or that problem that could cost him his life, and in this case I just wanted something to kill the upstart Jazz as soon as possible and this whole story about the division of the lunar plant and the mafia cartel suddenly intertwined with the narrative ended.
327.305 SRY