Artemis by Andy Weir

 

Rating 4⭐

320 pages

You can buy Artemis...here

You can find out more about the author...here

• The Blurb...

WELCOME TO ARTEMIS. The first city on the moon.
Population 2,000. Mostly tourists.
Some criminals.

Jazz Bashara is one of the criminals. She lives in a poor area of Artemis and subsidises her work as a porter with smuggling contraband onto the moon. But it's not enough.

So when she's offered the chance to make a lot of money she jumps at it. But though planning a crime in 1/6th gravity may be more fun, it's also a lot more dangerous.

When you live on the moon, of course you have a dark side...

• Our review...

I read this book as part of my 52books in 52 weeks challenge. You can find out more this...here. This week's prompt was futuristic technology.  I picked this book on the strength of the author (who had previously wrote The Martian) I did not read the blurb so I expected similar but on the moon as opposed Mars. Imagine my surprise on learning that this novel is very different. it  actually set in a moon city,  albeit a frontier city. It's more like Tombstone than Paris. In addition the protagonist is a woman of Saudi Arabian/Muslim descent and it's written in the first person. Kudos to the author for even thinking of taking that on in the first place. That could be a minefield.

Our heroine is Jazz a porter with a sideline in smuggling. But Jazz is also a genius with mad welding skills amongst other things. One day she is offered an industrial sabotage job that will set her up for life. However there are forces at work that Jazz knows nothing about. As Jazz struggles to stay alive and rectify the situation the stakes get higher and higher. She is forced to seek aid from a rag tag assortment of friends and her semi estranged father. 

While The Martian was Robin Crusoe in space, Artemis is basically Ocean's Eleven in space.

Weir's strength is two fold. Firstly world building. The details of his moon city and environs are both intensive and extensive. He is obviously a space nerd. After reading up a little on the subject apparently the science is also very accurate too. He spent a full year just researching the world building before even thinking about characters and plot. His genre has been described as "Science Fact" because there is not a lot of fiction involved. While this is a big plus in making the novel believable the amount of engineering terms and jargon can slow the flow of a non-sciencey (is that a actually a word?) reader. See first selected quote for example.

His second great quality is blending real life society with all its inherent ills and flaws into his futuristic world. There are prostitutes among the moon hotels, there is crime in the most scientifically advanced place in the universe. It's shiny in parts but your'e not far away from feeling dirty. In that way it's a bit like New York or London or any big city and this also adds to the credibility.

There is humour too although I must say if I didn't know Mr Weir was from the USA, just by reading, I think you could tell he is not a Brit. Not an ounce of sarcasm or cynicism. He seems a very optimistic person. Which I must admit I quite like. 

All in all a lively space heist romp. 

• Selected Quotes...

I hurried to the thermal control box. I unscrewed four bolts and took the access panel off. I yanked out the thermocouple management board and produced a replacement board from my duffel. Svoboda had spent the previous evening piecing it together. Pretty simple, actually. It acted just like the normal board, but it would lie to the computer about the bath temperature, always reporting it low. I inserted it into the slot.

It’s pricey to get here and expensive as hell to live here. But a city can’t just be rich tourists and eccentric billionaires. It needs working-class people too. You don’t expect J. Worthalot Richbastard III to clean his own toilet, do you?

Rudy DuBois is a seriously good-looking man. He’s two meters tall and blond as a Hitler wet dream.

People will trust a reliable criminal more readily than a shady businessman.

But no idiot-proofing can overcome a determined idiot.

• If You Liked This Then You May Like...

The Return by Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes

Gunpowder Moon by David Pedreira

One Way by S.J. Morden'

• About The Author...

ANDY WEIR built a two-decade career as a software engineer until the success of his first published novel, The Martian, allowed him to live out his dream of writing full-time.

He is a lifelong space nerd and a devoted hobbyist of such subjects as relativistic physics, orbital mechanics, and the history of manned spaceflight. He also mixes a mean cocktail.

He lives in California.