Jazz Bashara has a bad habit. Every day she opens her banking app and looks at the same figure, as though staring at it might make it grow. She has 11,916 slugs. She needs 416,922, and Artemis by Andy Weir will not tell you why for another three hundred pages.
Not four hundred thousand. Not half a million. That exact number, down to the last unit. When a man she trusts finally asks her outright, she tells him to get lost. When the answer arrives, in the last chapter, it lands harder than any of the explosions.
That is the useful thing to know about this book before starting it. The caper is fun. The number is what it is actually about.
A City That Runs on Kenya Time
Artemis is the first and only city on the moon: five half-buried domes named for the men who walked there, a population of two thousand, and a clock set to Nairobi because the Kenya Space Corporation owns the place.
Money is measured in slugs, short for soft-landed grams, which is not technically currency at all but prepaid shipping mass. There is one constable. There is no jail, because serious crime means deportation to the victim’s country and everything else means the constable hits you as hard as you hit somebody else. Food for people who cannot afford imports is Gunk, flavoured algae grown in vats.
Jazz is twenty-six, a porter by trade and a smuggler by preference, and she lives in a capsule bunk she cannot stand up in. Her ambitions are a private shower and a bathroom nobody else uses.
When a Norwegian telecom billionaire offers her a million slugs to sabotage a mining company’s ore harvesters, she says no, then says yes before he finishes the sentence.
The Debt Underneath Artemis by Andy Weir
The sabotage plot is the marketing. The novel underneath it is about a daughter and her father.
Ammar Bashara is a master welder, devout, exacting, and the most quietly drawn character here. He has built a prayer wall in his flat, a sheet of aluminium angled 22.9 degrees off vertical so that leaning on it points him at Earth and therefore at Mecca. He and Jazz do not speak much. There is a reason, and it involves a fire, a workshop, and a seventeen-year-old who made every stupid decision available to her.
Artemis by Andy Weir carries this in a second channel: an email correspondence between Jazz and Kelvin, a Kenyan boy assigned to her as a school pen pal when they were both nine, which runs the length of the book and the length of her life. It is the best writing Weir has done. It covers homelessness, a genuinely ugly relationship, the slow construction of a criminal enterprise and a friendship conducted entirely across four hundred thousand kilometres, and it never once feels like a flashback chapter.
Everything the caper plot needs you to understand about Jazz, the emails have already done.
What Works
- The engineering is the story, not the wallpaper. A flint sparker will not light a welding torch in vacuum, because oxidation needs oxygen. Coffee is undrinkable because water boils at 61 degrees at Artemis pressure. Each of these is a plot point, not a footnote.
- The economics are the worldbuilding. Trade guilds have consolidated along immigrant lines. The administrator explains, calmly, that the city is an accidental Ponzi scheme surviving on the savings of new arrivals. That conversation is the most interesting scene in the novel.
- The safety culture is convincing. Fire is the great terror, so flammables are contraband and sealed rooms lock their occupants in. The EVA guild rations tours per member because of cumulative radiation exposure, which is exactly the kind of detail that makes a place feel administered rather than imagined.
- One sequence is genuinely moving. Jazz and her father weld a pressure vessel together. He spends three and a half hours on a forty-five minute job, because this time his daughter’s life depends on the seam.
Where Artemis by Andy Weir Gives Ground
- The voice is Mark Watney in a wig. Same rhythm, same deflection, same joke construction. Weir thanks five women in the acknowledgements for helping him write a female narrator, and the strain shows.
- The comedy is the weakest writing. A running gag about a reusable condom does not earn its page count, and lines like “I’m a girl, so I’m allowed” read as a man checking whether he is permitted to write this.
- The last act changes genre. A tight heist becomes a disaster movie, and the pivot costs the book its best quality, which was precision.
- The best character barely appears. Administrator Ngugi, a Kenyan economist who conjured a space industry out of the equator and a tax code, gets roughly four scenes. A novel about her would have been better than this one.
Read It If
Reach for Artemis by Andy Weir under these conditions.
- You want hard science fiction where the physics is load-bearing and legible without a degree.
- Cities as characters appeal to you more than plots do. This one has plumbing, guilds and an underclass.
- You liked The Martian and can accept a similar narrator in a much more interesting place.
Skip It If
- A wisecracking first-person voice grates on you, because there is no relief from it.
- You want a mystery in the traditional sense. The Mystery shelving is generous; this is a crime caper with a corpse in it.
- Crude humour about sex, sex work and bodies is not what you read science fiction for.
What to Read After Artemis by Andy Weir
- The Martian by Andy Weir. The origin of this voice, and the book where it fits the situation perfectly.
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. His best, and the one where the sentiment underneath the jokes finally gets room.
- Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. A far better novel about a decent crook, a debt and a city with rules.
- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein, the lunar colony this book is in permanent conversation with.
- Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson, for readers who want the politics of a moon settlement taken slowly and seriously.
What Stays With You
Artemis by Andy Weir is not the book its author is best at, and it is not trying to be profound. It is a competent thriller wrapped around an unusually good invented city, and the gap between those two things is the frustrating part. Every time the plot goes quiet and somebody explains how the smelter pays for the air, the novel gets better.
But the number holds. Jazz spends three hundred pages being flippant about everything that happens to her, and the one thing she will not joke about is a five-figure sum she has been saving toward since she was seventeen. When Weir finally opens that drawer, it turns out he has been writing a book about restitution the whole time, and the jokes were only ever the way his narrator gets through the day.
