By Andy Weir© November 14, 2017, Ballantine Books
File size: 9.2 MB
335 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0553448139
Jazz Bashara is a porter in the only lunar city, Artemis. She’s also a smuggler, which is a lot more profitable. But when she takes a job that seems easy and pays so much she can’t possibly say no, things go sideways. Now she’s in the middle of a huge conspiracy, the mob is after her, and life just got far more complicated than she likes. The only way to save her city is to risk even more than she already has.
I have to admit that I had a little trouble connecting with this story in the very beginning. Artemis starts out slow and builds bit by bit. At first, I didn’t much like the main character, but she grew on me as the story progressed. She’s scary smart, so much so that she hardly needs to try to excel at whatever she does. Thus she ends up slacking off far too often in her father’s point of view. She’s also a snarky curmudgeon, a loner who pushes away anyone that tries to get close. And it’s those very things that eventually endeared her to me, especially once I figure out why she acted that way.
The story, too, heats up. The uptick seemed, to me, to happen almost all at once. From that point on, the pace is fast and furious. I didn’t want to put the book down. As both other Andy Weir books, the science in this is super thick. I didn’t understand most of it, but thankfully I could skim and glean just enough to follow the intention. It did not interfere with my enjoyment of the story overall. And that climax, near the end…whew. I did not see that coming. Weir knows how to knock the breath out of his reader.
The setting of the story—a city on the lunar surface—is also part character in the story, because without the restrictions it puts on the storyline, there would be no story. Weir goes to some length to describe some of the scenes, which I found helpful. All the details made perfect sense – no windows (except in one place, with super-thick shielded glass), double hulls on the domes, with the gap between packed full of regolith, and so on—in a place that will kill you in an instant if you step out of line or don’t follow the rules. This is established right from the first page, and it’s reinforced in believable and valid ways throughout. Life on the moon would be tricky, to say the least. Weir took that challenge and ran with it, and it paid off.
Artemis lived up to my expectations of an Andy Weir book. I thoroughly enjoyed it. If you love tech- and science-heavy hard sci-fi, you’ll probably love this book. Highly recommended.