The novel “Artemis” by Andy Weir was published for the first time in 2017.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara gets by working as a porter on Artemis, the only city on the Moon, but dreams of doing much more and to accumulate the money she needs she smuggles various products with the help of a contact on Earth. Among her “special customers” there’s also Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who one day offers her a lot of money to sabotage the Sanchez Aluminum anorthite harvesters, part of a plan that would make him even richer.
Jazz tries to implement her sabotage plan but unexpected events start getting in the way between her and the big money Trond Landvik promised her. Things go really bad when Jazz starts realizing that behind the company there’s much more than they suspected and that includes the presence of an assassin.
Andy Weir became famous thanks to the remarkable success achieved with the novel “The Martian“, to the point that it was also adapted into a movie. A key feature of that novel was the precision with which the author described the various technologies used during a manned expedition to Mars and by the protagonist in his attempt to survive on the red planet after the other members of the expedition departed without him believing he was dead. Weir had the same kind of approach in writing “Artemis”.
This novel is set in the 2080s in the first and at that time the only city on the Moon. The name of the city is a reference to the Greek goddess Artemis, Apollo’s twin sister and in the Greek religion associated with the Moon. For this reason NASA also chose the name Artemis for the new Moon manned mission that officially will take place in 2024.
The story is narrated in first person by Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara and here there’s my first problem with the novel because I found this protagonist quite annoying. She’s 26 years old but during her teen years she screwed up a lot because she was a rebellious teenager and her story seems dull to me already, the worst is that years later she realizes she screwed up a lot but continues undaunted to screw up.
Already in “The Martian” I found Andy Weir’s not really funny, the same thing happened in “Artemis”. The situation is similar with Jazz who, even in the most dramatic moments, seems to try at all costs to make jokes. Besides the fact that in most cases I didn’t find those jokes funny, they took away the sense of drama from the story. You can add the continuous sexual references that seem to have been put there just to show that it’s a novel for adults. Unfortunately, Weir is not Heinlein and Jazz is not Friday.
The strength of the story lies in the fact that it’s developed in such a way as to bring to the spotlight a number of technologies, in particular the ones used to make the city of Artemis work and enable its inhabitants and the tourists who visit it to survive.
Andy Weir has certainly studied before writing “Artemis” to try to predict the technological developments of the next decades and plausibly describe a city on the Moon together with its inhabitants’ life and activities. The consequence is that every event of the novel is accompanied by technical-scientific information that can also concern the risks of the Moon environment, which at any moment is potentially lethal regardless of technological advances.
The inclusion of such information isn’t heavy-handed so the pace of the story is quite fast, also because after the initial part there’s a lot of action with surprises and twists. The characters are in my opinion a bit of a problem because they’re shown from Jazz’s point of view and this makes some of them almost ridiculous.
Overall, “Artemis” didn’t impress me, especially because of its protagonist. Andy Weir’s choice to write a novel narrated in the first person by a character like Jazz weighs enormously so I recommend reading it only if you think you can stand her.
