In his second sci-fi novel, Andy Weir, the author of “The Martian,” tried to do a 180 turn and write something different. His novel “Artemis” was only partly successful.

“Artemis” takes place on the sole human settlement on the moon, where everyone has a specific task, laws are mostly guidelines, the population is just a few thousand people, and everybody knows and (mostly) adores our protagonist, Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara.

Jazz is a 26-year-old full-time porter, part-time smuggler, whose family left Saudi Arabia when she was a kid, and who ends up getting in the world of trouble as the novel begins. It’s unclear what Weir was going for with this character: she has the mentality of a 16-year-old and the inner monologue of a teenage boy. (John Scalzi’s “Zoe’s Tale” came much closer to adopting the persona of a female protagonist, and he said that it took him ages to hone in on that writing style.) It doesn’t help that Jazz is Mary Sue incarnate: she can become an expert in electronics in just one day, or understand a groundbreaking PhD dissertation in chemistry after spending a few hours online.

To be fair, the science part of this science fiction novel was beautiful: Weir goes to great lengths to explain why Kenya would end up as a spacefaring superpower with its equatorial location; how to survive a fire in an oxygen-rich moon city; how and why an aluminum processing plant would prosper on the moon. The economy he describes is interesting as well: a single credit can buy you a gram of cargo shipped from the Earth.

Overall, the book is great sci-fi but with a supremely flat main character. When it inevitably becomes a movie, the screenwriters will probably do yet another 180 and give Jazz a personality transplant. Until then, however, I don’t recommend picking up “Artemis” until and unless you finish everything else on your “to read” list.

I give this book two out of five stars.

Full disclosure: I received an advance reader copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Buy “Artemis” on Amazon here, if you so choose.