Book Review | Artemis by Andy Weir - Attack of the Books!

Artemis by Andy Weir

If duct tape was what held Mark Watney’s world together in The Martian, then welding is what holds the moon together for Jazz Bashara in Artemis. If I was to make a wild guess, Andy Weir has spent a good portion of the time since writing The Martian (2011) learning how to weld, then reimagining how low gravity–lunar gravity–would affect welding. And then he probably practiced welding, just for practice sake, with different types of metal, and without oxygen, underwater, horizontally and vertically, and in every possible combination. And then he wrote a book about it.

About welding. On the moon.

Okay, maybe the whole book isn’t about welding. Maybe not even a large part of it. But way more than needed, perhaps, and probably a lot more than Jazz should know for poor vagabond without any formal education living on the moon. I give some allowance for being the daughter of an immigrant with some level of technical skill, but seriously. Where Watney was a highly educated scientist who I could believe could science his way out of it, Jazz is almost exactly the opposite.

But who’s keeping track?

Let me back up. Artemis is a hard sci-fi heist and, like The Martian, it’s chock full of Watney’s signature technical examinations of what is really going on when someone, say, jumps out a window in 1/6 g or, maybe, needs to weld some metal in a vacuum. It’s an engineer’s playground, and it’s everything you could want if you wanted to imagine how the wild west would look…if it was populated by engineers and on the moon instead of the west. It’s the wild frontier of space exploration. Weir’s vision is populated by the scrappy and clever people that survive, either by their wits or their wealth, when a new horizon opens.

Let’s be clear. It’s not a bad novel. Part of what made it hard to enjoy was that Weir’s last book was The Martian. Watney’s voice–which is what made The Martian so much fun–is probably Weir’s voice. But Jazz Bashara, a young woman of Saudi Arabian descent, is about as different from Watney as can be, but still manages to sound a lot like him. It’s a little stilted at times, and it makes her less credible. The dialogue just doesn’t fit.

But get past that, get past Jazz, and you start to see what it is about Weir that surpasses so many other writers. He sees and imagines how a moon base, a moon city, might actually work, the issues and problems that it’s inhabitants might have to deal with in order to survive, thrive, and grow. It’s cool, very cool. For a non-engineer like me, it’s occasionally dazzling and, at moments, a bit frightening.

Title: Artemis
Author: Andy Weir
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Crown
Release Date: November 14, 2017
Pages: 320

Jasmine Bashara never signed up to be a hero. She just wanted to get rich.

Not crazy, eccentric-billionaire rich, like many of the visitors to her hometown of Artemis, humanity’s first and only lunar colony. Just rich enough to move out of her coffin-sized apartment and eat something better than flavored algae. Rich enough to pay off a debt she’s owed for a long time.

So when a chance at a huge score finally comes her way, Jazz can’t say no. Sure, it requires her to graduate from small-time smuggler to full-on criminal mastermind. And it calls for a particular combination of cunning, technical skills, and large explosions—not to mention sheer brazen swagger. But Jazz has never run into a challenge her intellect can’t handle, and she figures she’s got the ‘swagger’ part down.

The trouble is, engineering the perfect crime is just the start of Jazz’s problems. Because her little heist is about to land her in the middle of a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself.

Trapped between competing forces, pursued by a killer and the law alike, even Jazz has to admit she’s in way over her head. She’ll have to hatch a truly spectacular scheme to have a chance at staying alive and saving her city.

Jazz is no hero, but she is a very good criminal.

That’ll have to do.

Propelled by its heroine’s wisecracking voice, set in a city that’s at once stunningly imagined and intimately familiar, and brimming over with clever problem-solving and heist-y fun, Artemis is another irresistible brew of science, suspense, and humor from #1 bestselling author Andy Weir.