Artemis by Andy Weir
Cover design by Will Staehle
Cover art by kovaltol/Shutterstock
Published by Crown Publishing
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I originally read the first chapter or two as an online reader magnet when the novel was about to come out. I was immediately taken by the first-person voice of the protagonist, and how she seemed to be in a situation quite reminiscent of Robert A Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, entering the workforce at a very young age, perhaps as a result of being orphaned.
Once I started actually reading, I discover that the situation is much more complicated. Jazz is actually an adult, and her father is still living right there in the city of Artemis. However, she is estranged from him as a result of an incident that we only learn about as the story progresses, and thus must make her own way in the world.
When we first meet her, she's running for her life across the lunar surface. She was on a moonwalk that was supposed to qualify her to be an EVA master and be able to lead tours, something that will allow her to make a lot more money. But a valve on her spacesuit's life support systems blew, and she has seconds to get into an airlock before she dies of asphyxiation.
She makes it, but it's still an automatic fail on her qualification test. She can try again in six months -- but in the meantime she has to keep herself afloat, in a city where it's literally illegal to be homeless. Where getting in trouble with the law means being deported to Earth -- and after living on the Moon since she was five years old, she'd require extensive (and expensive) physical therapy just to be able to walk, let alone do any useful labor there.
So she spends the rest of the chapter hard at work as a porter, earning her keep by delivering shipments for the wealthy inhabitants of Artemis. In the process, we learn its basic structure of interconnected domes, named in order of construction for the first five men to walk on the surface of the Moon: Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad, Bean, and Shepard (the last of whom was also America's first man in space, flying the first Mercury mission back in 1961, a decade before his Apollo moonwalk). It's pretty obvious that, when time comes to expand the city, the next dome will be named Mitchell, for Edgar Dean Mitchell, Alan Shepard's Lunar Module Pilot.
And we learn that Jazz is not an ordinary porter. She's picking up a very special package -- and then she has to get it past Customs -- which is run by the only man who passes for a law enforcement agent in Artemis.
It turns out to be a package of Havana cigars, to be delivered to the wealthiest man on the Moon, who has both a taste for these luxuries and a fireproof room in which to smoke them. They have to be smuggled in because they're against the law. Artemis is run on a low-pressure pure oxygen atmosphere, so anything that could cause a fire is severely restricted.
At this point, I'm thinking did they completely forget the lessons of the Apollo I Fire? Every crewed spacecraft since Apollo -- the Space Shuttle orbiters, the SpaceX Crew Dragon, the developmental Orion, Dream Chaser, and Starship -- are all built to use an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere (it was too late to redesign the Apollo Command Module, so other precautions were taken to keep combustibles to a minimum). However, given the protagonist's strong first-person voice, that issue wasn't enough to make me give the book a disgusted toss.
And it's a good thing I didn't, because I would've missed out on a great tale of industrial espionage, which involves the physical properties of the unique environment of both the lunar habitats and the lunar surface. Every element is as carefully thought out in all its scientific and engineering aspects -- yet it never loses its Action Girl feel.
As it turns out, her super-rich client has a business proposition for her. Instead of earning small-potatoes income smuggling high-end smokes, she can earn a bundle helping him take over the aluminum business by causing his competitor to be in breach of contract. Since she's an independent contractor and he wants plausible deniability, he just tells her what he wants accomplished and leaves the details of how to go about it to her. And he promises her enough money to get her out of poverty forever, to even rent an apartment that has its own bathroom, its own cooking facilities, and a real bed. Given that it combines the two things she likes: a technical challenge and the opportunity to make some serious money, she goes for it.
Jazz works out every step of how to put the automated nodule harvesters out of action, carefully and meticulously. It's going to take a number of resources she doesn't have -- which means she has to obtain them through various contacts she has around the city, without saying or doing anything that would tip them off that she's up to anything questionable.
Among those things is some welding equipment, which is how we learn the story of how she ended up on the outs with her father. When she was a foolish teenager, she and some buddies used his fireproof shop to smoke pot, but got just a little careless. And in a pure-oxygen atmosphere, just a little careless means disaster. They all survived, thanks to the meticulous safety precautions, including a fire shelter, that are mandatory for any high-temperature operations, but in the process her father's welding shop was completely destroyed.
Here's another point where my suspension of disbelief got strained: almost all the welders up here are Saudi. Which means that either the author did a great job of technical research, but blew it on the cultural, or the Arab nations have finally managed to overcome some of the serious cultural dysfunction that has kept them dependent upon outsiders to keep them in the twenty-first century (cultural issues that even fellow Muslim nations such as the Turks have remarked upon with considerable scorn). Without all the foreign technicians and other help, all those lovely modern cities in the desert would soon slip-slide into disrepair, and then into medieval filth. (Because human potential is important to me, I'm really hoping that this is a world in which the latter is true, and at least a subset of their culture has been able to find a way past the issues of their culture and master the necessary skills and mindset to enjoy success in a lunar settlement. After all, in the 1600's the Germans were known for filth and disorder, but by the twentieth century Germany had become the land of alles in ordnung).
Once Jazz had her gadget set up, she needed a way to get out of the habitat and onto the open regolith. It wouldn't have been so hard if she'd just passed her EVA master test, but without that certification in her Gizmo (a handheld computer similar to a smartphone which also serves as one's ID and wallet, among other things), the outer hatches of the airlocks won't open for her. It's a safety measure, to keep drunken locals or stupid tourists from getting themselves killed. However, there's a workaround -- as we saw in the opening scene, the same safety protocols ensure that the outer hatch of an airlock will always open from the outside, as long as the inner hatch is closed. Which raises the question of how to get that outer hatch opened.
The solution is a hull inspection robot, which she borrows from one of her many connections around Artemis. However, she still has the problem of getting it outdoors.
With the money her client has fronted her for supplies, she creates an identity for herself as a wealthy and very observant Muslim tourist, who wears full niquab, the hijab that includes a face covering with only a tiny vision slit. As a result, she'll be able to keep her face covered, and thus foil face recognition software, without raising any suspicions. And it'll be perfectly plausible for her to go on a tourist EVA, which will enable her to have the bot come out the airlock with her.
I was fascinated by the "hamster ball" and "scurry pack" system that allowed tourists with no special training to do EVA's (and which also meant Jazz would not have to undress and reveal her true identity, as she would've in her regular spacesuit). It appears to have been developed from the rescue balls that were carried on the Space Shuttle in the early optimistic days, when it was thought that an emergency in space could result in the specialists needing rescued, back when it was thought that the Space Shuttle would make spaceflight so routine that people would be able to fly without the extensive astronaut training they'd need to use an actual spacesuit.
Everything seems to be going smoothly, until she's in the middle of carrying out her plan. Suddenly everything's going wrong and she's in danger of being captured, or at least identified. She has to flee with the last harvester still not sabotaged, and then she has the problem of getting safely back into Artemis before her oxygen runs out, and without getting caught by the EVA masters or getting identified through any of her equipment.
Even after she's safely inside, she's got the problem of deflecting interest in her. Rudy, who's what passes for law enforcement in Artemis, is looking for whoever blew up those harvester bots, and he's looking at her.
As if that's not enough, her client is unhappy about the harvester she failed to destroy. He wants to talk to her -- but when she arrives at his apartment for the meeting, there's no answer.
It turns out that her client and his bodyguard have been murdered. Suddenly the stakes are a whole lot higher, because the company he wanted to take down is in fact a front for South American drug cartels, as she discovers by research that involves a daring escapade posing as a prostitute.
Now what started as a caper has become a mission to keep her city from being taken over by organized crime and used as a front and money laundry in perpetuity. Sanchez Aluminum has to be taken out of business for good, and that means yet another technological caper to destroy the smelter. However, she's misjudged when she set off the alarm to get the place evacuated, and discovers that the scientist who originally developed it is still in there, trying to fix the problem.
Jazz is willing to destroy property, and she'd probably be willing to kill someone who was actively trying to kill her, but she is not willing to kill a scientist who's so focused on the technology as to be oblivious to the danger. So in goes Jazz on a desperate rescue mission, and from there everything starts going haywire.
I'm thinking that one of the major problems is possible only in a pure-oxygen atmosphere, and would have been completely obviated if the'd been using a dual-gas system. However, the technothriller element of the ending is so powerful that it's only after you're done and thinking about it that you really start noticing that the chemistry involved is only possible because of a whole chain of questionable technical decisions on the part of the builders of Artemis. If they'd used a two-gas atmosphere for the main part of the city, if they'd put in intermediate systems instead of a direct gas pipeline between the smelter and the city, etc. etc. etc, there would've been no story. Or at least not nearly the level of thrilling conclusion.
I honestly thought that Jazz was going to buy it to save her city -- except that raised the question of how the story could be told first-person, given that while there's all kinds of advanced space technology, there's been very little technology applied to human biology. She doesn't have any kind of implanted computer that would be able to record her consciousness right up to the moment of death, like in some cyberpunk 'verses. In fact, it's already been established that her future still hasn't been able to figure out regeneration, as witnessed her client's paraplegic daughter, who's the reason he's moved to the Moon.
But no, Jazz survives, thanks to several people's quick thinking and even quicker actions. She's badly injured, but everything worked out just right that they're recoverable injuries, not ones that will leave her a blind, deaf and brain-damaged cripple for the rest of her life.
On the other hand, the legal issues are a lot harder to get around. And while she does find a solution for them, she ends up right back in the situation she was when we met her in chapter one: flat broke and living in a tiny capsule the locals call a "coffin."
It almost makes me wonder if having everything come full circle was a way to open the door to future adventures of Jazz in Artemis. I'd certainly read another two or three or even more books, as long as the quality stays high and the author can maintain that sassy, sometimes cynical, voice that really makes the story.
Buy Artemis on Amazon.com
Review posted February 6, 2021
