Andy Weir’s Artemis Is a Lunar Adventure Packed with Science and Mayhem

Artemis is just as fun—perhaps even more so—than The Martian, delivering on all the promise of a setup that couldn’t be more different. This is no Robinson Crusoe story. Instead, we’re following an endearingly sardonic narrator who gets into all kinds of illegal and dangerous shenanigans as she attempts to pull off a heist in the only city located on the Moon.
Jazz Bashara is probably a genius. At the very least, she has an eidetic memory and a facility with numbers. Her father, a welder in the lunar city of Artemis, thinks she should do something productive with her life, something worthy of her intelligence, but Jazz loves money a little too much, and has other plans. She uses her day job as a porter to facilitate a lucrative smuggling operation between Earth and the Moon, standing apart from the rabble by maintaining a reputation for honesty and good business sense among her clientele. When one of her loyal customers offers her the most dangerous and difficult job she’s ever encountered, she says no. Until he also offers her an absurd amount of money. Then she says yes, and the great Artemis Crime Caper begins.
With all the verve that somehow made reading about Mark Watney’s potato farming efforts on Mars thrilling reading, Weir briskly and beautifully lays out an Oceans 11–style crime spree, to be carried out by the resourceful Jazz and her eclectic cadre of friends. It’s great fun, but what’s most remarkable is how carefully Weir has considered the real science behind his high-concept hijinks. He sprinkles in real chemistry, gravitational considerations, mathematics, and other hard science in concise and engaging passages this English major would probably skip over in any other book. Science is integral to the plot (and, in the unforgiving atmosphere of the Moon, a matter of life and death for Jazz), and it’s incorporated smoothly, deftly avoiding labored exposition or lecturing. The science is, in fact, delightful to read about, and it’s obvious Weir had just as much fun writing it. 

It’s not just the science; the worldbuilding of this near-future lunar colony is rich in cinematic detail, and Jazz, a Saudi woman who moved with her father to the moon at six years old, is an irresistible narrator. In first person, she directly addresses the reader, and the result feels like sitting across from her at a dive bar in a moon crater somewhere, listening to her recount old stories of the epic scrapes used to get herself into. Weir makes the intimacy look easy; the prose is smooth and joyful, just as pleasurable whether savored or raced through at breathless speed. This isn’t a future of Star Trek idealism—Artemis is a city with depth and grit, operating atop a completely plausible criminal infrastructure. Since we’re looking at it from Jazz’s point of view, we spend most of our time with the blue collar workers, and less with the population of colonial elites, even as she travels effortlessly between both worlds in her job as a porter who moonlights as a smuggler.
This is not a particularly deep or dense read, but that’s not what we expect from the author of The Martian. We want pure adventure, and a perfect escape from our own earthbound worries. And on that score, Artemis delivers.
Artemis is available now.