Hey, have you checked out that movie The Martian with Matt Damon stranded on Mars? Well, the guy who wrote that also wrote a second book called Artemis. I read it. Now I'm reviewing it. I have mixed feelings about this book. There I said it. Right from the get-go there were red-flags with Artemis. I'll get to those in a moment.
First, let me set the stage. This book takes place on the moon, probably in the near future, but the story doesn't get into the timing. Artemis is the first and only city on the moon, a habitat of a couple thousand permanent residents mixed with perpetual tourists, inside little domes. It's more or less self-sustaining and our hero, Jazz, is a young woman of Middle-Eastern descent who considers Artemis her home. She's been there since the age of six and never wants to go back to Earth again. She gets by on petty smuggling and delivery services and a strong sense of independent spirit. When a rich businessman offers her a million moon-bucks to commit a much more dangerous form of vandalism and corporate terrorism so he can force an aggressive take-over of the moon's only real industry (aluminum and oxygen production), she says sure. A million moon bucks is, well... I'm not sure what it's actually worth, but it's a lot, I'm sure. I'll be the first to admit that it's probably not fair to review a relatively new author back to back with Hemingway, Steinbeck and Vonnegut, but whatever. He should be glad he made the queue at all. Jazz. Jazz is a woman. Andy Weir is not. And despite his acknowledgements page where he thanks the alleged women who helped him capture the voice of a female narrator, he failed. I honestly was surprised to learn many pages into the story that Jazz, the actual first person narrator, was indeed a woman. In fact, even as the feminine pronouns piled up, I was sure they were typos. Multiple typos. That's how thoroughly "male" the narrative voice seemed to me. My suggestion is to get the audiobook, performed by Rosario Dawson because number one, she's awesome, and number two, she'll inevitably imbue the narrator with undertones of femininity that might save the story. Now, I know what you're thinking... Don't I also write in the first person using a female voice? That's correct! The Collected Adventures of Lorna Lockheed is on sale now! Ya know what else? Mine is also snarky, sardonic and full of attitude. She spits, shoots, and swears like any man and drinks like any sailor. So who am I to judge Jazz, who talks like a college frat boy and drinks cheap beer at the local bar? What makes Lorna so natural as a female and Jazz so unnatural? Am I really just that good of a writer? I'll give Andy Weir some credit though, Jazz gets much more believable by the second half of the story. I think it comes down to nuance (my favorite word). If you think too hard about how a woman's voice would sound, you only succeed in creating a caricature or stereotype and embarrass yourself as tone deaf. If you just write "normal", then as a man, you'll write a normal man, regardless of which pronouns you pepper in. The truth is, you should really just be writing the character as a person. All men and women are just people, and people are people. If your character is fully realized, you should be able to write them male or female just as easily. And if they are not fully realized, even writing a man will come across flat and unbelievable (assuming you're a male writer to begin with and/or that you don't think men really are flat, vapid and undeveloped creatures that only superficially resemble "people"). Also, there's no Heist. The book is billed as a heist book and there is no heist. There is crime, but not a heist. There is a mystery and a mission, but no thieving. It's corporate warfare. Vandalism. Sabotage. Then there are catastrophes to avert. The company she's sent to sabotage turns out to be connected to the Brazilian maffia (bet you never heard of them before!) and they're not happy when Jazz tries to interfere with their multi-billion dollar plans to upend the telecommunications industry by selling some newfangled fiber-optics that can only be made in low gravity (ie. the moon!). To beat them, and avoid being murdered to death, Jazz has to make friends with all the people in her life she's kept at arm's reach, put a team together and... still no heist. Just more blowing stuff up. Which leads to more problems but which then leads to saving the whole moon-colony. All of her friends are men. Sure, there's her father, her coworker, her barkeeper, her potential love interest, her gay friend who stole her ex-boyfriend (long story) and her frenemy the constable, but... Nope. I don't see any female friends. This is paramount to writing a female character well, especially as the lead and especially as the first person narrator. Women have women friends. They talk to women and do things with other women. They have close and meaningful relationships with their mothers, not just their fathers. If your female character has none of these female relationships, but seems otherwise normal and well-adjusted, then you are not writing a real woman. You are writing a man and you didn't notice, because all your friends are probably men, too, so why would you think anything is weird about it. But a woman without women friends is not just normal, and it would affect her somehow. This is why I made such a point to make Lorna Lockheed's mother such an important part of her story, and why I'm expanding her relationships to include more female friends in Volume Two (Coming "Soon"!). Okay, enough with the feminist talk. Is the story actually any good? It's fine. It's a hit movie in the making, probably starring some young, Middle-Eastern looking (but not too much) version of Rosario Dawson, if they're lucky. It's super mainstream and you can just feel all the ways in which it was designed to seem progressive to mainstream audiences without being uncomfortably so. It's totally hiding in the shadow of Michael Crichton, a much better writer, by telling exciting stories full of science. But while Michael Crichton had the ability to make his science achieve documentary-like levels of verisimilitude, Weir feels like TV level science. Bill Nye verses Stephen Hawking. He does tons of research, and I'll be honest, the dude seems to really know his stuff and he's got really great info on how things would work on the moon. He even does an incredible job incorporating those details meaningfully into the plot. They aren't just there for show. But... But shut-up already with the exposition! This may be the other real reason Jazz doesn't read like a convincing woman. Because she doesn't real like a convincing person in the first place! She's a robot! She's Siri! All she does is explain technical details like a wikipedia page. As a narrator, she never shuts up about the gravity and the bio-domes and the monorail which isn't a real monorail, and then in a vain attempt to pass the Turing test she adds in a swear word and a lame aside directed at the reader to be funny (I bet you're thinking this is a bad time to insert one of my own? You'd be damn-right!). It usually turns out to be useful information later on, and at least it's not made up technobabble like in Star Trek, but in the end, it's just way too much exposition. Jazz can't walk down a hall without sounding like a tour guide that I don't feel like tipping. It's not wise to start a story with so much exposition because it's lifeless writing. Worse, he tries to compensate by dialing up Jazz's attitude to eleven to keep it sounding conversational. This choice ends up producing a scattered lead character with fits and spurts of obsessive details intercut with extreme emotions. Like she's on the spectrum. Conclusion: 3 out of 5 stars. Andy Weir is gonna make a ton of money off the movie deal for this book and ya know what, it might even make a half-descent movie with the right director. But as a novelist, you should only recommend this to your aunt on her vacation. It's light and fun but nothing too serious. It's a competent, plot heavy caper full of twists and turns that I mostly enjoyed reading, but nothing you'll be thinking about by the end of the week. It felt contrived and over-produced like a can of SPAM. Instead I would recommend Sphere by Michael Crichton, a truly original and unique sci-fi with way more science and suspense and which will give you something to chew on long after you've finished.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Captain's Blog
|