Book Review: Artemis by Andy Weir

 

Artemis

by Andy Weir

This month, the theme for my book club is a whole genre, science fiction. I admit I haven’t been reading much of that lately, but a friend reminded me that one of my favorite science fiction author in recent years, Andy Weir, had a new book out recently. (I talked about his book, The Martian, on this blog some time ago, you can find that post at https://storymusing.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-martian-by-andy-weir.html ) My library doesn’t have his newest, Project Hail Mary, available in digital format yet, but they did have his second book, Artemis, which I had not read either.

Artemis is a fascinating story set on the moon in a settlement where people live in bubbles, and far underground. The main character, Jazz Bashara, is a young woman who workers as a porter, and as a smuggler. The story is told in the first person from her perspective and her voice is fantastically distinctive.

“Whatever it was, I couldn’t find any mention of it online. That meant it was a secret. Now I really wanted to know what it was. Turns out I’m a nosy little shit.”

By her own admission, Jazz has made some pretty poor choices in her young life, and it is her propensity for making such decisions that drives this story forward. It seems perfectly logical at the time, as she relates the story, but we can see her life going off the rails. She’s a little bit of an anti-hero, but she has her own standards and sense of honor. She won’t take payment for a job not completed.

Jazz has been smuggling stuff people need for a while, but here she takes on a different job, much more complex, with dangers she has no idea exist. Every time I turned around, this book morphed on me into a slightly different story. There are revelations about things that happened in the past through letters with her pen pal on Earth, and revelations about things Jazz doesn’t know yet. I love twists and turns in stories.

Another thing I love about Weir’s writing is how he works explanations of fairly complex science into the narrative by creating a question in the reader’s mind that he then answers in fairly conversational language through his narrator. It makes it so much more accessible and interesting than the information dump that writers are often prone to in trying to set up a reader for a situation.

The setting itself is complex and fascinating. The gravity is 1/6^th that of the Earth and they have a terrible nutritional food named gunk. Then there’s the whole issue of how oxygen is created, which plays a central part in the story.

This one is compulsively readable and I highly recommend it.