- Publisher: CROWN PUBLISHING GROUP INC
- Publication Date: November 14th, 2017
- Pages 320
- ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
- Author: Andy Weir
Artemis by Andy Weir is set on a small Lunar city made up of various interconnected ‘bubbles’. Jazz (Jasmine) is a young resident, barely scraping by with a combination of working as a delivery person, and the occasional smuggling of contraband. When she gets the chance to make a huge score by helping a billionaire with some corporate sabotage, she can’t pass on the opportunity. She doesn’t realize it will make her a target for organized criminals, as well as the local lunar ‘police’.
Part heist story, part crime story, and all hard science fiction exploration of what it might be like to live in a lunar city, Artemis is a lot of fun. Weir provides a lot of details about how the lunar city is constructed, and how it functions both technically and socially. He creates a complete world on the moon in the not too distant future. He doesn’t do quite as good a job at creating his main character. Jazz seems like a bit of a teenage geek fantasy creation. Beautiful, intelligent, snarky, capable, sexy, promiscuous but honorable, etc.
If you think about it very much, the character and her choices are not very believable, and the way most people interact with her are not very believable either. Having said that, if you are willing to suspend disbelief a bit and just enjoy the ride, it is a fun ride.
The complexity of the ‘heist’ and sabotage efforts do not really seem reasonable that Jazz would attempt them. The activities and the risk level seem farfetched and over-the-top. But Weir likes the science, and the explanations for how the activities take place are interesting and seem scientifically sound.
It is not as good as Weir’s other books that I’ve read. The Martian and Project Hail Mary are better than this one, but Artemis is still worth the time to read if you like science in your science fiction. Perhaps Weir is best when he is concentrating on a single human protagonist who does not have to interact with other humans directly. Still, if you want a roller coaster ride that you can just enjoy without thinking about the non-science details too much, this one is fun.
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Matt is the author of the hard science fiction thriller “Plastiphobia: aka Plastivore” and his newest novel “Anthrophobia: A Teacher’s Tale”
