Artemis: review

[NB: no major spoilers.]

Andy Weir's second novel Artemis is his 2017 follow-up to 2011's smash hit The Martian, which got made into a 2015 movie. The story takes place on the moon of the late 21st century, in the sole lunar city of Artemis, home to a population of around two thousand. Artemis's main industries are tourism and aluminum smelting, a byproduct of which is the oxygen that keeps Artemis's residents alive.  

Our protagonist (and narrator) is a feisty Saudi-born woman nicknamed Jazz (for Jasmine), who currently ekes out a living working as a porter, delivering packages for a fee. She has just failed a test to become an EVA master—a position that would have allowed her to earn far more income giving tours to new arrivals to the moon. Jazz supplements her legal income via smuggling, and she has already had several run-ins with the local law as represented by Artemis's constable, Rudy. She is estranged from her father, Ammar, and she is surrounded by a retinue of colorful friends, ex-friends, acquaintances, and enemies. 

One of Jazz's clients is Norwegian billionaire Trond Landvik, who promises to pay Jazz a million slugs (the lunar currency, largely unregulated) if she can sabotage the aluminum-smelting operation run by Sanchez Aluminum, a Brazilian company that also happens to be in thrall to O Palácio, a prominent branch of the Brazilian mob. Landvik wants to take over the aluminum smelting for his own reasons, but after Jazz agrees to work for him and manages to sabotage three of four ore harvesters (she promises to take care of the fourth), Landvik and his bodyguard end up dead, thereby orphaning Landvik's daughter Lene, a paraplegic able to get around on crutches in the moon's low gravity. With Landvik now dead, Jazz finds herself unpaid, on the run, and needing to extricate herself from the pickle she's found herself in. Artemis is an action-packed mystery that takes place in what is essentially a small town composed of double-layered domes, and Jazz has to use all her wits to survive a series of twists, betrayals, and run-ins with one of O Palácio's assassins.

Artemis is, in some ways, no different from Weir's other two novels, The Martian and Project Hail Mary. As in those stories, a smart protagonist has to rely on wits and science to solve a series of seemingly intractable problems. The main difference is that, in the other two novels, the protagonist is generally alone in space (in Project Hail Mary, our protagonist acquires an alien friend, but there are no other humans to help him), but in Artemis, we're in the midst of a nascent civilization: a town (or colony) on the moon that is on the cusp of expanding into something much bigger.

Weir manages to evoke the complexities and quirks that come with living on the moon, such as how longtime residents deal with the much lower gravity versus how tourists deal with it. The economy of the town Artemis is also an important backdrop for the story: the aluminum-smelting business has actually plateaued, but a revolutionary new technology is about to bring with it some sweeping changes that could alter the balance of power both on the moon and on Earth. Artemis gives us a grand tour of lunar civilization—how it caters to tourists, rich people, and the working poor, and the various tensions that exist among certain important people. The novel has a very dimensional feel as a result; Weir is a talented world-builder, and Artemis feels like a plausible thing.

Overall, I found the plot to be a page-turner, and I blew through the novel fairly quickly. Jazz makes for a likable heroine; she's smart and resourceful, but she's no Mary Sue, and she often has to rely on others to get things done. Like Weir's other protagonists, Jazz has a smartass wit about her, but this novel is laced with somewhat more profanity than the other two. Not that I minded; I simply found the difference in tone noteworthy because I had thought Weir to be somewhat sparing in his use of Anglo-Saxon expressions in his other works. The book is well paced and laced with science facts; this seems to be a trademark of Weir's narratives. The book is also smart enough to introduce nuances that savvy readers can pick up on, such as the fact that Muslims don't bow to people: they bow to Allah alone—a quirk that almost gets Jazz, a lapsed Muslim, in a lot of trouble.

That said, the book also contains some implausibilities that I can't get into without revealing crucial plot elements, including one monumentally unbelievable scene involving Jazz and the person who has been pulling the strings behind the scenes. Despite these flaws, though, the plot zips along quickly and comes to a more-or-less satisfying conclusion.

Of Weir's three novels, I'd probably rank Artemis last, not because it's particularly bad, but because the story didn't have that element of isolation and desolation found in Weir's other two novels. I don't blame Weir for trying something different, and I applaud his empathetic effort to write a story from a twentysomething-female point of view (women who read the novel might feel differently). I also appreciate the amount of physics he brings to bear, even if much of it was abstruse to me. I'm not scientifically rigorous enough to rip holes in the science-y aspects of the book; it all seemed pretty plausible. That said, the story felt crowded with characters and therefore a little too noisy for my taste. That's what I get for reading Weir's other two novels first.

All in all, I'd recommend Artemis as a good, quick read. It's light; it goes down easy; you'll learn some interesting facts about physics and chemistry, and you'll probably end up rooting for Jazz as a well-fleshed-out heroine, despite her many flaws.