Artemis

In 2014, Andy Weir successfully realized the dream of transitioning from software engineer and science nerd to blockbuster novelist with the Crown Publishing release of The Martian. I loved it. This year, 2021, he published Project Hail Mary, which reminded me that he had published his second novel, Artemis, four years ago and while I own a copy, I still had not read it. I resolved to remedy that. As I have stated previously, I am a slow reader, but I blasted through Artemis in a week during a handful of reading sessions including a particularly relaxing one at the beach.

Andy Weir returns to a first person perspective, this time telling the story as Jasmine, a twentysomething of Saudi descent who was raised on the lunar colony Artemis. Jasmine is intelligent and has great potential, but instead of applying herself in a science or a trade that would benefit the colony, she works as a porter making deliveries much to the disappointment of her father, also a resident of Artemis. Jasmine makes ends meet by moonlighting as a smuggler, a side hustle with particular synergy with her work as a porter. The colony’s lone star of justice, Rudy, has his watchful eyes on Jasmine but has not yet been able to catch her in the act. When Jasmine is offered a dangerous but lucrative assignment by a wealthy benefactor, she jumps at the opportunity. When the job goes bad, she is forced to run for her life, but when you live in an enclosed lunar colony, there aren’t many places to run to.

As in The Martian, Weir’s science explanations are in layman’s terms, allowing people who aren’t NASA geeks (and I use that term with utmost affection) like him to participate in the story and understand the science of lunar colonies. Did you know that while moon dust looks soft and pillowy, it is actually composed of very small balls of spiky rock and if you breathe it, it will shred your lungs? Good safety tip. Weir uses his knowledge and fandom of the history of manned spaceflight and space exploration to craft a believable lunar colony.

Jasmine is headstrong and smart. She has a mouth on her that gets into trouble as often as it gets her out of it. She has quite a bit of baggage that she has not yet unpacked, but it informs her actions, misguided though they may be. What I did not like about Jasmine was the oversexualization of her character. She has a reputation for sleeping around and nearly every interaction she has with a male character includes the topic of sex in some form. At one point in the story, she is trying to obtain some information and dresses like a prostitute to gain access to a restricted area. At another point, she meets a brilliant engineer friend who wants her to test out a new product he has designed. That product is a reusable condom and he has chosen her to test it because he knows she is promiscuous. One or two of these things throughout the novel would have seemed normal, but all of it packed into this three hundred page story felt gratuitous. After the fifth or sixth occurrence, I thought “wow, this is why female readers hate it when men write from a woman’s perspective”. I brought this up to my mother who also read the book and she said she none of it bothered her and suggested Weir was making a point about gender hypocrisy in sexuality.

The story of Artemis is a lot of fun. Whereas The Martian was a survival story, Artemis is a heist caper. While the main chapters tell the story in the first person present, the first half of the novel also includes letters Jasmine wrote to her Earthbound pen pal beginning in childhood and continuing as the two grow into adulthood. These letters help explain more of Jasmine’s state of mind and how her smuggling operation began. I enjoyed these glimpses into her past.

Not as brilliant as Weir’s stunning debut, Artemis is still an entertaining science fiction story. It is an accessible novel that could be enjoyed by people who only read science fiction casually. Even those who enjoy digging into the deep and challenging stories written by hard SF authors like Kim Stanley Robinson will enjoy the lighter themes of Artemis.

Fury From the Tomb

Adventure stories can take many forms. Probably most or all of the fantasy novels I have read in my life would be categorized as adventure, but I seem to have something specific in my mind when I think of the term. The story must take place in the real world though there may absolutely be supernatural elements. While a novel like The Hobbit is certainly an adventure, the fact that every element of the story is fictional eliminates it from my brain’s adventure category. Indiana Jones. Now that’s adventure. Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy series — though I admit I have not yet seen it — or the National Treasure series which I also have not seen. Am I destroying my argument here? Let’s stick with Indiana Jones then. Or the spectacular video game series Uncharted. Exotic real world exploration. Traps, chases, mortal danger, a forbidden treasure. Adventure.

Several years ago, I was at a Barnes & Noble Booksellers location during a road trip and I saw the cover of S.A. Sidor’s brand new (at the time) novel Fury From the Tomb. It took me a matter of nanoseconds for my brain to send a signal to my hands to snag it off the shelf. Look at that cover art. Excellent work by cover artist Daniel Strange. It is clearly inspired by the Indiana Jones film posters which themselves are inspired by the cinema posters for serial adventures from the ‘50s and ‘60s. I love it and I bought my copy based on the cover alone.

In the late 1880s — so we are predating Indiana Jones by half a century — a young Egyptologist named Romulus Hardy receives a golden opportunity when a wealthy and elderly Los Angeles man offers to fund Dr. Hardy’s very first archeological expedition. The benefactor has specific instructions though. Dig up a mummy from the Egyptian tombs and deliver it to him in Los Angeles. Had everything gone smoothly, the story would probably be a newspaper article on the back page, but the cover has a clearly animated mummy and a speeding locomotive being chased by bandits on horseback so it is safe to assume something akin to adventure occurs.

Hardy’s journey takes him from the tombs of Egypt to a train robbery in the Arizona territory to Mexico in pursuit of his quarry. Along the way, he gathers allies who end up doing the vast majority of the dirty work on Hardy’s behalf and here is where my unfair Indiana Jones expectations must be pitched aside. Dr. Jones is a capable, experienced adventurer. Dr. Hardy on the other hand is a rookie on his first expedition. He prefers the comfort of a library to field work and he is claustrophobic so exploring the dark, dusty, narrow corridors of underground tombs ended up not being as glamorous and sexy as he had hoped. What further sets this adventure apart from something like Indiana Jones is the heightened supernatural elements. Jones always dealt with the supernatural, but he never had to contend with creatures like mummies, zombies, and vampires.

The one major issue I have with this novel is the first person perspective. Because the story is told in a retrospective narrative decades after the events of the novel, we know the protagonist survives all of his adventures unscathed. This strips away any anxiety or fear the reader may have for the hero when he is in a dangerous situation. Consequences are reduced to minor inconveniences rather than true life or death scenarios. Hardy’s allies always seem to be in more grave danger than he is and I felt like it is their efforts that drive the story forward rather than Hardy’s. He is just along for the ride instead of driving the caravan even though he is supposed to be the leader. There is growth potential for Dr. Hardy, certainly.

Fury From the Tomb is the first of what is currently a two-book series (the second volume, The Beast of Nightfall Lodge, is available now). I do not know if S.A. Sidor plans to write more books in this Institute for Singular Antiquities series, but if he wanted to make Dr. Rom Hardy a long-running character, developing him from baby-faced newcomer to rugged adventurer, he absolutely could and I would join him on the ride.

Shadows Linger

I am new to the work of Glen Cook, but I do know that his novel The Black Company, published in 1984, is considered by many to be the birth of the popular grimdark category of the fantasy genre which is now dominated by authors like Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, and George R.R. Martin. It is a subgenre that interests me but with which I have little direct experience yet. Of course, I and the rest of the world watched HBO’s Game of Thrones television adaptation based on Martin’s hit series, but as far as the reading of books goes, I think Mark Lawrence’s Red Sister and Jonathan French’s The Grey Bastards are the only two that immediately come to mind.

I found Glen Cook in an odd way. I was watching this video (skip to 27:13) on the YouTube channel The Modern Rogue and hosts Brian Brushwood and Jason Murphy were performing an ad for Audible, discussing the books to which they were listening on the platform. Jason described The Black Company thus: “The Black Company is a group of hard-bitten mercenaries who are mostly trying to do the right thing. It puts a paramilitary gritty spin on all the fantasy tropes.” As brief as the description is, it was enough to sell me on it.

I listened to the Audible Audiobook of The Black Company in Summer 2018 and really enjoyed it. I love Glen Cook’s writing style. His use of vocabulary is just challenging enough that I find myself gratefully dipping into the dictionary a few times each book. Cook’s writing is so economical and elegant, crisp and snappy. Reading Cook’s sentences is like racing across a field on a horseback. It feels so good.

I loved the moral flexibility of the characters, which is a primary element of grimdark fantasy. Within The Black Company, the heroes might very well be the villains of traditional fantasy stories. In Cook’s story, however, they operate in a grey area, hoping they are doing the right thing but really working for whoever is paying their contract. While I would like to imagine myself as good and pure as Tolkien’s Frodo Baggins, I relate much more to Cook’s heroes. Here is Croaker, the Company’s annalist and physician, on the subject: “I do not believe in evil absolute. I believe in our side and theirs with the good and evil decided after the fact by those who survive. Among men, you seldom find the good with one standard and the shadow with another.”

In Shadows Linger, book two of The Chronicles of The Black Company, the Company is in service of The Lady, one of several powerful beings known as The Taken. The Lady orders them to the distant northern coastal city Juniper where evil is brewing. Croaker thinks The Lady is evil too, but this is a case of choosing the lesser of two. The devil you know and all that. Shadows Linger introduces one of my favorite characters of the series so far, Marron Shed, a tavern owner in debt to some dangerous people. His character arc is wonderful.

Because I have listened to both The Black Company and Shadows Linger on Audible, I now have particular fondness for the narrator Marc Vietor. In his performance of both books, he injects a tone of weariness in his voice, perfect for the ever-exhausted Croaker and his companions. While I still prefer to hold a physical book in my hands, Vietor is a prime example of the benefits of audiobooks.

I am now infatuated with this series about the bedraggled Company and am eagerly shifting book three, The White Rose, higher on my TBR.

Ready Player Two

Ready Player One was one of my favorite novels the year it was released. (Check out my podcast episode on the novel!) Having grown up in the Eighties and Nineties, the novel’s reliance on late 20th century pop culture references placed me firmly in the target demographic. Having firsthand knowledge of so many of the films, books, comics, and video games referenced in the novel, I felt like I was an active participant in solving the riddle of Halliday’s Egg. The novel also expanded my pop culture knowledge as I researched references with which I was unfamiliar. Further, since video gaming is my main hobby aside from reading, Ready Player One was a nearly perfect wish fulfillment fantasy. I read the hardcover when it was released and during a difficult time in my life, I found Wil Wheaton’s Audible Audiobook narration to be a supreme happy place for me and listened to it several times. I even enjoyed Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation as I found myself once again fantasizing about being able to exist within a fully virtual world.

In late Autumn 2020, Ernest Cline released the long-anticipated sequel, Ready Player Two. Because I have enacted a book-buying ban on myself until I clear out significant real estate on my Unread Shelf and because I adored Wil Wheaton’s audiobook narration of the first book so much, I used an Audible credit to snag the audiobook version of Ready Player Two which is also narrated by Wheaton.

I had some concerns though (not about Wheaton, I am a total fanboy). At the conclusion of Ready Player One, protagonist Wade Watts finds himself truly Joseph Campbell’s Master of Two Worlds as he wins administrative control of the virtual world The OASIS as well as its creator James Halliday’s multi-billion dollar fortune to enjoy in the meat world. Oh, he also gets the girl. In true Hero’s Journey fashion, readers follow Wade’s rise from orphaned kid living in the slums to the world’s wealthiest and most powerful man. How is a sequel going to work when the hero already has everything he could ever want? Look at other stories that do something similar. Hamstring the hero, strip them of their power. Introduce an even more powerful enemy. Raise the stakes. Cline handles the issue well in Ready Player Two while also introducing new elements that once again activated my wish fulfillment synapses.

Wade is forced to deal with the corrosive nature of power and greed, not from the capitalist monster from the first novel, but from within as he becomes a shadow of himself. As he comes to terms with his fall from grace and struggles to right the wrongs he has inflicted, he finds himself once again tasked with saving The OASIS. Wade must also confront the dangers of hero worship as he discovers the skeletons in James Halliday’s closet. I enjoyed this part of the novel. So many of the world’s heroes are expected to be perfect beings, but even the greatest among us are flawed individuals. This may be Ready Player Two’s best lesson … aside from the whole giving-a-machine-control-of-your-brain-maybe-not-being-a-good-idea thing.

As in the audiobook for Ready Player One, Wil Wheaton performs Ready Player Two with a sincerity and warmth that felt like a fuzzy blanket and cup of coffee on a brisk winter morning. He also narrates Armada, Cline’s second novel, so I may have to listen to his performance of that novel and see if it elevates my enjoyment of it.

Ready Player One was beloved by millions, myself included. Detractors, however, were not impressed by a contest winnable only by being the best pop culture nerd. I actually enjoyed that aspect of the novel because I recognized a lot of references and those I did not know, I had fun researching. If you did not like Ready Player One for this reason, know that Ready Player Two is much more of that as Wade races to find the Seven Secret Shards before his opponent. In the first novel, I accepted Wade’s success because he had spent all of his free time studying his hero’s favorite books, movies, and video games. However, his encyclopedic knowledge in Ready Player Two, especially regarding John Hughes films and the actors who starred in them, did begin to wear down my patience. Whereas Wade’s pop culture knowledge was critical to his success in the first novel, it was focused, even when Wade was chasing a red herring. In this sequel, there are lengthy passages that feel like Ernest Cline is showing off his own knowledge or fruits of his research. That is the only downside to what I feel is a wonderful and worthy sequel to one of my favorite stories.

Ernest Cline concludes the novel with an interesting scenario that could be a satisfying conclusion to a two-book series or could be a springboard to an entirely new series of stories. If he chooses to end the tale here, consider me a satisfied reader. If he has another OASIS seed germinating in his creative brain, look for me at the bookstore on Release Day.