Artemis

Artemis by Andy Weir

Having read and massively enjoyed both The Martian and Project Hail Mary I was excited to finally read Andy Weir’s second book, Artemis, and was immediately hooked from that fantastic opening airlock sequence. By the time Jazz had failed her EVA exam I was onboard with finding out more about her and following her story.

Artemis is a story about Jazz, a young woman who lives on the moon city Artemis and works as courier/smuggler. When she takes on a sabotage job way above her pay grade and royally fucks it up she’s chucked into a world of murder, conspiracy, and responsibility. She’s resourceful and clever, but is also someone who constantly makes bad life choices, and getting involved with gangster is definitely one of her stupider ideas.

Artemis felt exciting from start to finish. It had that charm that all of Andy Weir’s work has, and a leading character that you enjoy spending time with. She’s not as noble as Mark from The Martian, but is perhaps even more capable in her own way. She just needs to get out of her way long enough to show it.

I really did like Jazz. She’s smart, sexy, and very capable, but such a fuck up (my kind of character) Just bad choice after bad choice, despite having something of an honour code. I like how vulnerable she is, while she constantly tries to hide it. How much she needs other people’s help but acts like she doesn’t. Her relationships are great throughout, especially with Rudy and Svoboda. She’s a loner fuckup who ultimately needs to learn how to ask for help in order to get her life in order. A classic story in that regard.

All the side characters are great. There wasn’t a single character in the whole book I didn’t mind spending time with. As it’s Jazz’s story we get to learn her opinion on everyone, and quite often she’s wrong. Her acting like a brat only adds to the other characters development as she begrudgingly admits to things like Bob being right to fail her, while still not letting go of the grudge. Or her somewhat estranged dad being right about most of her poor life choices. There’s plenty of examples like that throughout, especially with Artemis lawman Rudy. He’s someone who is noble, but her being a smuggler and all, she tries to paint him as the bad guy.

The conspiracy plot is interesting and works really well. The action chapters have a great pace to them. And as always Weir paints a great picture with the detail he goes into about everything. That mixture again of relatively hard sci-fi but leaving himself room to breath if he wants to do anything outrageous really works for him. His books are always fun.

I really enjoyed Artemis a lot. Weir is 3/3 for me. I didn’t love it the way I did Project Hail Mary but it isn’t quite as big of a story, and Jazz isn’t the hero Grace turns into. She’s a petty criminal who can be so much more (and grows tired of people telling her that) and I thoroughly enjoyed her story. It's a fun read with strong characters and a good theme throughout. A book I highly recommend, just like his other two.