Customer Reviews

On the outside, everything about this audio book looks good. The much anticipated sophomoric novel from breakout sci-fi author Andy Weir read by Rosario Dawson is a great preface in itself. Add to it the promise of the first moon colony, some corporate espionage, a lone wolf heroine saboteur and the possibilities are endless. Then it just sits there. And all the aspects that could make it great are that much more annoying. Dawson does a fantastic job narrating. The problem is the characters have no depth, the storyline is swiss cheese and the dialogue is juvenile to an infuriating level. The protagonist delivers wannabe witty sarcasm endlessly and has hardly any likable moments. Humor falls flat at every attempt and there are many, many attempts. Very disappointing. The science is interesting but that can only go so far. If you're looking for the best sci-fi and you haven't done it yet, check out The Expanse series.

One of the things I really enjoyed about the Martian was a main character who dealt brilliantly with unfortunate circumstances that were caused by forces out of his control. By contrast- Jaz - the main character in Artemis- is totally responsible for one mess after another. Artemis is a story about a supposedly smart person who consistently make very stupid decisions. Jaz attempts to solve each of her problems (which she largely creates) by creating situations that are worse...and each disaster is worse than the last. She’s a liar and a thief - and while she’s very creative in her solutions she is a destructive force in her own life. Not a fan. I listened to Artemis because I enjoyed the Martian so much. If I had listened to Artemis first I doubt I would have picked anything by the same author.

Andy Weir has shown once again he is a master at researching and building a truly amazing sci-fi universe. Unfortunately, his dialogue is juvenile and his story boring. Scientific details aside, the book read like a pre-teen thriller. The characters were all one dimensional and dialogue was appallingly simple. The story was boring at best and read more like a screen play than a rich, deep, and enthralling book.

I honestly wanted to love this book. There is a lot of good substance here, and I hope Andy finds the time to take everything he’s learning to write a book to truly remember. For now, it looks like all we’ll get is a book perfectly suited for a 90 minute movie.

This has all the right ingredients. Written by Andy Weir, read by Rosario Dawson - what can go wrong?
A lot apparently.
The book is bad. Weak story, awful main character and the science feels artificially placed. It’s good science but it does not drive the plot nor it is very interesting.

As for the performance - I am conflicted. Something was not working. Rosario has great voice, good accents, and the production is very well done. But the overall result is bad. I just don’t know if it’s because Rosario is missing something or just the bad story and awful main character comes to life through her voice and projecting on the performance.

I am still very hopeful and Weir’s next book. The Martian was great and I very hopeful this book is a temporary setback.

The Martian was a book while reading you thought this will make a great movie some day, Artemis on the other hand feels like it was written for todays movie audiences as a forethought.

With a great concept, Weir falls short with his heroine, he shows us plenty at how technically astute he is but not so at writing from a woman's perspective, which made the protagonists development weak, leaving less empathy for her actions. The overly ambitious plot has too many holes in it to make Artemis more than just ordinary and to me it had a chance to redeem itself but Weir opted for more of a hollywood ending.

Rosario Dawson has a wide range and delivers a solid performance but the stereotypical accents of some of the characters does not seem accurate for people living in the most diverse city ever.

Artemis just tries too hard not to be The Martian and ends up becoming more like Die Hard on the Moon .

I became a huge Andy Weir fan when I read "The Martian" and later the short 6 minute story called "The Egg". I was so excited for this new Andy Weir book. The first 3 hours I hated it. It was boring, and nothing was done to bring the reader into the characters, especially the main protagonist. After that, the book picked up the pace. It's a short book, so throw out the first 3 hours and it's really short. However, it still amounted to nothing more than an average sci fi story. Had this been my first Andy Weir book, I would have never read another. The reader was good, but her inflections of the main character's voice would not have been the choice my mind would have gone to if I had read this instead of listening. Some of the time she had this so called street smart girl sounding like a dumb valley girl. I could not get into this one. Not at all.