Books 2019 - Artemis by Andy Weir

[byslantedlight]

Mount TBR so far = 7/24
Lj Book Bingo Masterpost

Welcome to Artemis. The first city on the moon. Population 2,000. Mostly tourists. Some criminals.
Jazz Bashara is one of the criminals. She lives in a poor area of Artemis and subsidises her work as a porter with smuggling contraband onto the moon. But it's not enough.
So when she's offered the chance to make a lot of money she jumps at it. Now all she needs to do is plan the perfect crime in one of the most dangerous places in the universe - and survive it.

From the moment I saw the cover I was pretty sure this was going to be made into a film. After the first few pages, I was certain. After half a dozen chapters I was serious disillusioned with the entire blockbuster movie and wanted to walk out halfway, but I've only ever done that once in a film (Pret-a-Porter) so I kept going. When I finished the book just now I googled - and sure enough it's been made into a film. So even though it's not actually a film yet, I'm using Artemis for that square, because there's no way this won't happen.

The thing is, this should be an ace movie. It's science fiction, set on the moon, the hero is a smart non-white female, the sub-heroes are non-white, gay, a geek... Tick - tick - tick... The trouble is, despite all those things, the world they live in is exactly the same as the world is now. Women are sluts if they sleep around, jokes are based on the same dominant-white-male morals. Even - despite the fact that she's our hero, Jazz (non-white) is also a criminal. Yes, she has ethics, but... she's not really a good guy. And no matter how smart, she also makes some serious mistakes along her way.

Normally I'd be cheering the idea that the hero is actually a grey character - I can't stand these perfect heroes, because they're just not realistic. But it really grates on me that it's this non-white female hero who's being portrayed as grey. How often do we see dubiously-ethical accidentally-competent white male heroes rather than actual white-hats? And it's not as if Jazz has a tragic background to explain what she does, or her life decisions (a la Lethal Weapon's Martin Riggs, or most "rookie cops") - not to mention that she's the villain, not the cop. No - her original mistake was based around falling in love with the wrong boy when she was a teenager.

She could also entirely be a bloke. You could have switched the genders in this book without any issue, because the characters are all men at heart. Which would be fine (equality of outlook etc.) if their outlooks hadn't been based on a patriarchal background that I really want gone in the future, when this book is set.

What the author is telling me is "yeah, I like the world like this and it's not going to change, baby [because it feels the kind of patronising where he'd call me/women "baby"] - nothing is going to change".

And that's just not what I want from my science fiction. Gaaaaargh!

For all I know the author really did want to write something that genuinely redressed the gender-imbalance in films (and science fiction) - it just didn't succeed for me. The stock characters were all male (certainly not a 50-50 gender balance of characters): the hero was a woman and the head of the planet was a woman, and the ultimate villain was a woman; in other words the occasional woman is allowed to squeak past society's baseball bats and smack-downs (it's an American book *g* - substitute cricket bats and head-buts, or your other glass ceiling of choice) but the rest of us - well, we're nicely hidden away in our place, where we should be.

Gaaaaargh! I expected so much more. And that's before I get on to talking about how annoying Jazz is as a character in her own right. She literally explains things to us, as the readers - "Remember, explanation of science thing...", almost everything else she says (or thinks, or tells us) is a wisecrack, and most other things are her being aggressive to someone. I have no idea what all the people who were credited as advising the author on how to write a female character did, but they didn't encourage him to write a female character - they let him write a wisecracking movie hero from the 1980s. I loved The Martian, but it was only doing what it did - it didn't try to do more, like Artemis, so it didn't have that to completely fail it.

I will give Kudos for Jazz's dad, who I really liked - a Muslim character with morals and ethics that you can believe, and actually even a reason (which we're given in a fairly heavy-handed way near the end) for his actions with Jazz. Well done the beta-reader who Islam-checked that angle, and I just wish all the characters had been treated that way instead of being allowed to be (male) stereotypes.

It's bound to do very well in the box office, and it won the Goodreads Science Fiction Book of the Year award for 2017 - though I can only see two SF books in the list of nominees that were clearly written by women (others with first names I don't recognise might have been, but we're still talking about 4/20 - oh, and two of those were in the middle of series).

On the bright side - BINGO! *g*

Comments

[gilda-elise.livejournal.com]

So, probably not a very good movie? Though while I didn’t think much of the first book 📖, I did enjoy the movie.

[thesmallhobbit.livejournal.com]

Yay for a bingo!

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Oh no, like I say I expect it'll do well at the box office - it feels like it was written to be a movie from the start. It's got everything that Hollywood seems to expect...

I haven't seen The Martian movie yet, but I really enjoyed that book!

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Yeay! *g*

[heliophile-oxon.livejournal.com]

Sounds like it basically misses the defining quality and entire point of science fiction as a genre - the "what if"! What would it mean for society/us/me/people in general/X people in particular etc. etc. if this that or the other aspect of reality were different.

Seems like this author has done a bit of a "Flintstones/Jetsons" and decided that no matter what differences there are in the world, society is going to be fundamentally exactly the same - essentially completely unchanged from the tiny little slice of human civilisation that they personally are used to ... oh dear :-s

Sorry you had a disappointment, but it was interesting to read your breakdown of why and how it fails to measure up :-)

[ariss-tenoh.livejournal.com]

It sounds like a book written by a white male author unaware of his societal privilege....

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Well, it focuses on the what if that the author - as a man - is presumably most interested in. I guess it was clear from The Martian that he liked the hard science of things (which is cool) - but ignoring society/people/relationships etc. is rather problematic...!

Hee for Flintstones and Jetsons - yes! It did feel rather like that. *g* And I guess my tolerance for it has worn rather thin. We should have been seeing changes - even gradual improvements by now, and it's so depressing to find that nothing has happened really since the 1980s... *sighs*

And hee - I'm glad you didn't mind my rambling! *g*

[byslantedlight.livejournal.com]

Well yes, I suspect so - although the acknowledgements show that he had the book "female-checked", and he did actually make an effort to include female characters who weren't entirely stock-screaming-girlfriend material, so he seems to be aware of something on some level... but not interested in addressing (or perhaps able to address) it in any depth, sadly...

[ariss-tenoh.livejournal.com]

Science fiction written by women is more interesting in my opinion. They know how to push the boundaries of the genre.

I think it's difficult for men who've never faced discrimination to write about it. I've just finished reading a 72 volume manga series by a Japanese author who was really clueless about women, even though he claimed he had his wife check some things for him. *sighs*

[stellar_raven]

I have the audiobook of this one, but haven't read it yet. I also read The Martian via audiobook, too.