I thought Weir really knew engineers, but it turns out he really knows male engineers, he has no idea how to write a female character. As a male, I probably also have no idea, but I'm 100% certain that the internal monologue of his female protagonist Jazz was much more like a horny male teenager than a woman. At one point "boobs" are mentioned 5 times in 10 pages. There's an over-the-top focus on her sex life, including a whole side plot about a re-usable condom, which seems imagined direct from the brain of a 18 year old boy.
They only come about once a week. The next one wouldn’t be for three days. Thank God. There’s nothing more annoying than trust-fund boys looking for “moon poon.”Apart from the cringeworthy gender caricature there's the dumb heist, which is implausible on many levels (spoilers):
- Business model for optic fiber that apparently has to be manufactured on the moon. There's no way this is profitable.
- Jazz being a genius at pretty much everything, but basically is a lowlife smuggler wasting her time on a implausible act of sabotage for which the motivations also seem ridiculous
- Not being punished when it's found out she was a saboteur/terrorist
- The whole climax - both the getting into that situation and getting out of it with few deaths
And you have to read dialogue like this:
“He’s right, Dad. I am an asshole. But Artemis needs an asshole right now and I got drafted.”Could he save it with the technology? That was amazing in the Martian. No. It's space welding all the way down, nothing else. The brief for this book was "make a space welding textbook sexy so 18 year olds will want to read it".
1 star.
