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I was in my early teens when I first met Artemis. It was in Latvian as I didn't read English then. It was approximetly the same time when I got acquinted with Harry Potter, and during first three books Artemis was my absolute favorite. Later both me and Harry grew older while Artemis stayed the same or even got stale, thus, my overall simpaties slowely switched.

More than 10 years later I returned to the saga as the last books of the series were never translated into Latvian, but I still hold the interest about how the adventures of the boy-schemer ended. Yes, now the physics of the book seems a bit less believable, but the witty language and lively characters are still here. And I still love Captain Short and Artemis for being something like positive role models for me.

For Captain Short it might be more obvious - an heroic, no-bullshit character, who does the right thing, when circumstances call for it, and a female - no pink nails, none of the ridiculous girly stuff the otherwithe reasonable female characters are attributed just because they are females.

For Artemis as the antihero it is less obvious at first, but it is still there - his nerdiness and antisociality is everything you need to make a teenager a miserable outcast, while, in the case of Artemis this is toped with massive amounts of self-confidence, determintion and ability to use his talants to achieve whatever he wants, thus, completely subverting the poor nerd's trope. Usually, if a character is a nerdy teenager, he has to do something to be accepted. Artemis doesn't - having his life under his control is not something he fights hard to achieve, it is something he has for granted. Being nerdy is not something he has to supress or find a workaround for, it is the one thing he is the best at, the one thing he uses to achieve everything. For a nerdy teenager myself it was a pleasant and unexpected change those years ago.

What do you do, when the show in the theater you attended last night does not let you go? You do some searching, find the book and read the play to relive it again. Copenhagen lets you dream about the age when fundamental science come to be through heated debate of the greatest scientists, still preserving those scientists as human beings - emotional, confused, vulnerable and afraid of the war they are later captured in. The play retells you important events of the friendship between Heisenberg and Bohr, offers you to get to know both of them, but in the end you have to devise your own conclusion - what did Heisenberg wanted to say in Copenhagen, 1941? Because no-one will ever know for sure. We even might suspect that Heisenberg himself did not know that.

My compliments on tying together scientifical explanations - they are accessible, but not dumbed down to the extent to strip you of believing that Bohr and Heisenberg could have actually said something like that.