Artimis By Andy Weir - Good Fun Story And Fine Second Novel

Artemis by Andy Weir

In 2011, author Andy Weir blasted onto the Sci-Fi scene with his first novel The Martian. Some may say that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but as we who read often find, there are authors who seem to have a gift and can crank out one good story after another. Weir would seem to be one of those authors who has found his gift and proves it with his second novel, Artemis.

Artemis is set completely on the Earth’s moon around the year 2080 which has been colonized. The small city known as Artemis is made up of a complex of large dome units that house its residents and provide workspace for numerous craftspeople that work to make a living in the hostile Lunar environment. Artemis is located in the Sea of Tranquility very near the landing site of NASA’s Apollo 11 mission that also affords a fairly active tourist trade. The story centers around a character of somewhat questionable character named Jasmine Bashara who is commonly known as “Jazz” to her friends.

A “porter” by trade, someone who delivers packages to people in the Artemis complex, Jazz also runs a small but mostly harmless smuggling operation. She barely makes enough money to live in Artemis and is under the constant scrutiny of the stations security officer. She has learned how to work the system to her advantage, but also has a reputation for being a bit dishonest and somewhat promiscuous in her personal life. While most serious crimes are punished with deportation to Earth, Rudy, the security chief, handles minor crimes in his own way. While Rudy keeps Jazz under loose scrutiny, he also seems to overlook a lot of Jazz’s petty criminal activity.

For those who have lived their entire life on the Lunar surface, deportation to Earth is the worst possible thing that could happen. Imagine living in an environment that had one-sixth the gravity of what we here on earth live our lives in and then suddenly having to adapt to the full gravity of our panet. So Jazz has managed to avoid doing anything that would sentence her to live the rest of her life as an invalid. That is, until she gets caught up in a plot for a hostile takeover of the Moon’s biggest industry, the mining of aluminum.

Jazz is offered a very large sum of money to perform acts of sabotage against the established company so a new company can take over operations. While she has an idea of how much trouble she will be in if caught, she agrees to take the job. When the company holding the contract sees through Jazz’s very carefully designed plan, she learns that she has gotten in to a situation that is way over her head. What follows are murders and threats to life in Artemis making this story a great sci-fi thriller and a fun read.

For the most part, Artemis does not follow the same formula as the Martian in that this is a thriller involving a lot of people. However, at the same time, There are some similarities in that Jazz is concerned with survival, just as Mark Watney. Once again, as in The Martian, Artemis’ author uses explanations of science that Jazz has access to in her adventure is well within reach of the common reader. Along with that, the main character has a great sense of humor and the same snarky attitude affording the story to inject a little humor into even the most grim situation. Many of the interactions between the characters had me laughing out loud.

Weir seems to enjoy writing about a single character and going well into their development. I found that I did care for Jazz as the book went on, while at the same time not being impressed with her behavior. Let’s face it, she is a criminal and is committing crimes of various levels from very petty to an incredible attempt to sabotage the work of a company that was responsible to providing all of the oxygen to the Artemis community. The characters plan was well thought out by the author, but he left plenty of holes for the antagonists to see through. There is no doubt that Jazz is a very intelligent individual as well as a strong female lead for the book, but she is not all knowing and does make some almost fatal errors. As to the other characters and their development, there isn’t much there, they just seem to be supporting characters that are either there to help or hinder Jazz as she goes about the business she chooses. I would have been interested to see a few of the supporting characters get a little more growth in the story.

The most impressive part of Artemis for me was the elaborate depictions of the environment of the moon, both inside and outside the station. Weir seems to have a huge fascination with surviving in space and explains the construction of the Artemis station domes and the other fixtures with great detail. The author would seem to have gone to great lengths to make the science believable and easy for the common reader to understand. He goes into great detail on the tasks that Jazz does to avoid problems as she moves through the story.

As mentioned earlier, Jazz seems to have a well known reputation around the moonbase of being quite sexually active. Everyone seems to know it and there are numerous references to it; perhaps too many. No matter where she goes, or who she meets she, and the reader, are reminded of this and Jazz seems to not be a bit put out when someone makes reference to it. Funny thing is, during this entire story, Jazz has no intimate contact with anyone and seems to not think about it very much. I found myself wondering why this was part of the story, it had such a large presence and not a lot of substance. It felt to me like it might have been part of an attempt at humor. For me, these parts of the story fell flat and were unnecessary. Fortunately though, it didn’t overshadow the real meat of the plot and I was able to overlook them in retrospect.

The overarching theme of Artemis would seem to be one that is becoming more popular as time goes on; how will those who are outsiders or disadvantaged to be treated in the future? We have seen it in other feature films including The Force Awakens. We have seen it in recent television shows such as The Expanse, Defiance, and even Star Trek: Discovery.  It hasn’t been long since all we had in sci-fi was a more utopian view from shows such as Star Trek in which there is no want and everyone is more interested in bettering the human condition than in obtaining wealth. In Weir’s story, Jazz is a subservient character who is relegated to getting minimal compensation for delivering goods to her betters. Her personal living space is so small that she can barely stand upright and she envies the more affluent tourists and residents that can afford such things as food not grown in vats and a private bathroom. She then learns to live a little better by performing petty acts of smuggling until an ambitious customer dangles a carrot in front of her where she is then all in for some major criminal activity. How will this actually play out in the future? Only time will tell, but I am thinking that the ideal of a Star Trek-like utopian future is not what the future holds. Rather the opposite is what I think, and as it is now, the gap between the haves and the have nots will only become wider. So it is with Jazz; she is not greedy, she just wants something better for herself and finds the only possibility of advancement in illegal activity

While not perfect, I was not in the least disappointed. I did enjoy Artemis and was entertained all during the time I read it. I would recommend it to readers who appreciate good sci-fi with solid science, and a good story, but aren’t too absorbed in well developed characters beyond the star of the show.

[Well, there it is…

[Qapla’!

Edited by Benjamin Arrowood

Confessions Of A Prairie Bitch by Alison Arngrim - Meeting Nellie Oleson at O Comic Con Was An Unexpected Treat & The Book Is Awesome!

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated by Alison Arngrim

As a Sci-Fi fan, it usually surprises people that one of my favorite television shows of all time was Little House on the Prairie. It still is to this day. Whenever I happen to be channel surfing and I run across an episode, I will stop and watch it. We have even begun to get the complete series on disc and I have been known to binge-watch several episodes in a single sitting. I cannot pinpoint why I enjoy Little House so much. As I think about it though, there are many reasons. I suppose that some of what I enjoy is that the portrayal of the characters made them real to me, and they became people I actually cared about. Pa Ingalls was always the hero as he guided his family through the rough times, very seldom losing his composure, but willing to do whatever it takes to make as comfortable a life for his family as possible. I really loved the family friend, Mr. Edwards, who always sang “Old Dan Tucker,” a song I learned from my dad long before Little House ever aired. Then there were the townspeople that were always fascinating, especially a spoiled little brat of a girl named Nellie Oleson who made it her mission to make the life of Laura Ingalls as miserable as she possibly could.

I was very surprised last year when I learned that the actress that portrayed that spoiled brat was going to be at the O Comic Con in Council Bluffs, Iowa. The first question that came to mind was, what the hell is Nellie Oleson doing at a sci-fi convention? Seemed a little odd to me, and still kind of does, but I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to meet and get an autograph from a favorite television personality. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I did suspect that the actress would be far different from the character she was on the show, and I was right. While everyone was lining up to meet Ray Park (Darth Maul from The Phantom Menace) I saw that Alison Arngrim was sitting at her table with not a single person in line there. Chrissy and I visited with Alison for several minutes, picked up a couple of autographed photos, had our photo taken with Alison, and I bought her book, which she happily autographed for me. I finally found an opportunity to read the book recently and enjoyed it immensely. I was also happy to learn that my suspicions about Alison were correct. She is not the bratty, combative, and sometimes hateful character she was on Little House. She is a kind and friendly person who is also hilariously funny and she appreciates her fans, even those who cannot disconnect her from her character. If you are a fan of the show or not, if you ever have an opportunity to meet her, take advantage of it, it will be well worth the time.

I had no idea what to expect from the book beyond a few stories about her life as a childhood actor and her time on Little House. There is that, but there is much more in those pages published in 2011. Alison discusses her life in some detail from her earliest memories through her efforts to combat AIDS and child abuse. In those pages she outlines some very disturbing episodes of her life as well as many good times. Of course, my favorite parts of the narrative were those that talked about the behind-the-scenes happenings on Little House.

I don’t usually make it a habit to follow the personal lives of the personalities that I admire because I am often disappointed in what I find. I was shocked to learn that Alison is a victim of sexual abuse by her older brother. It began at the age of six and continued for six years until she began working on Little House. Along with that, her older brother introduced her to dangerous drugs. I also learned that he was on the show Land of the Giants, not one of my favorite Sci-fi shows; I have watched a few episodes, but I guarantee that I will never watch it again. When the Little House chapters begin, very little is mentioned about these early years of Alison’s life until later in the book when she finally dealt with her feelings with some help. It was some hard stuff to read and I had a hard time reconciling how someone who had endured this didn’t snap and have deep emotional problems. Alison said that her time on Little House was like therapy to her because she found a caring family there, and playing a girl who “kicked and screamed, and ranted and raved” helped to alleviate her “demons.” Alison’s writing about her trauma is very matter of fact and there are no indications that she feels sorry for herself; instead, she shows herself to be of very strong character and I admire her for how she dealt with something that could have very well made her a bitter and angry person.

In the chapters that discuss her time on Little House, she writes about the relationships with the other actors on the show, many funny, and not so funny happenings on the set, and some hilarious incidents away from the set. One such story that made me laugh uproariously was when Alison and Melissa Gilbert discovered some rum-soaked snack cakes at a neighborhood grocery store during one of many sleepovers that the girls shared as they grew up. Apparently, Melissa Gilbert was not allowed to have very many sugar-laced snacks at home, so on the occasions that they were together at Alison’s home, they would take full advantage of any opportunity to indulge themselves in unhealthy bliss. The rum-soaked cakes were later removed from the shelves when it was discovered that a lot of kids seemed to be buying them by the sackful and enjoying them for other reasons than satisfying a sweet tooth.

In the years following Little House, Alison discusses her finally confronting her demons and her healing, her activism in her causes, and her continuing relationships with those that she was on the show with.

If you are a fan of Little House, I think you would enjoy this book and I would recommend it as a good read about what it means to be a childhood actor. It sure isn’t easy, and there are times when it isn’t fun either, but if you have the strength of character that Alison has, one might find a successful and satisfying life.

Well, there it is…

Qapla’!

Edited by Benjamin Arrowood