I quite liked The Martian, but this is just dire. Weir the engineer gets to have a lot of fun, and his explanations of how a moonbase might actually work in real life - at least the technical parts of it - are actually fascinating. I'd love to have read a simple, dry, non-drama non-action 50-page history and explanation of Artemis.

Instead, he has to try and build a plot around it, and everything that was slightly off about The Martian gets to take centre stage while everything that worked gets thrown out the airlock. Instead of one person and a distant team vs the forces of nature, we now have a plucky outsider hero vs a not-very-mysterious villain. Weir tries to be 21st century by making the hero a woman of colour, which hey, points for effort, but his attempts at getting into the head of a 20-odd-year-old woman by way of tons of sex jokes get very tired very soon, and with no in-story reason for her to constantly be monologuing and throwing cheap jokes at the reader. The moonbase is an interesting construction, but where he could have got a lot of mileage out of exploring just who would choose to live in a place like that he just throws in a bunch of flat characters with Very Obvious Traits that are basically walking Chekov's Guns. Where The Martian had clever people solving impossible problems, here the stakes are a lot lower and consequently everyone has to be a technical genius but a functional idiot. The can-do optimism of The Martian gets turned into a dime-a-dozen caper plot, with very little to recommend it.

Very barely 2 stars, and that's just for the technical problem-solving aspects.