So: this is the follow-up to the New York Times bestseller, the mega-selling, runaway-success debut novel and very profitable movie The Martian. The Martian was first published in 2014, after being online before that. Despite being only three years for most people, it seems like a long while ago… but it’s clear from this that Andy’s been busy.
Artemis (Definition: “a Greek moon goddess, often portrayed as a virgin huntress”) is set at a time in the near future when Mankind has colonised the Moon, but not entirely. There’s one city, next to where Armstrong and Aldrin landed in 1969. It’s in this setting that we’re introduced to Jazz Bashara, one of the basic grunts trying to make her way upward through life as a porter to the many rich and privileged on the Moon. Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent. Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she’s stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself – and that now her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.
So: using Andy’s other job as software engineer to good effect, Artemis is on solid ground, albeit Luna rather than Terra. It’s a book that combines entertaining aspects of different SF novels and tropes – there’s a near-future feel, a bit of a heist story going on, a bit of a Luna vibe (see also Ian McDonald, albeit less determinedly internationally global and less sexual than that). My first thought whilst reading is that Artemis has a rather Heinlein-esque feel about it. Heinlein had that difficult knack of writing seemingly simple and approachable text whilst also keeping a plot moving and at the same time not alienating the reader. It’s very tricky to get right, even now, but there’s a reason why Heinlein went from the SF pulps on to mainstream magazines such as the Saturday Post, and Artemis seems to echo it. In fact, it’s a surprisingly confident book for someone on only his second novel.
The last time I remember such an ability to manage tech-talk without losing track of the characters and the plot in mainstream novels so obviously was probably Michael Crichton (before Jurassic Park.) For long time SF readers there’s nothing particularly new here – see Heinlein (already mentioned), Ben Bova’ Grand Tour started in the ‘70’s, and more recently Ian McDonald’s Luna books, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, even James S A Corey’s Expanse series. (I’m sure that you can add others.) It’s a great read, as much of a page-turner as The Martian was, but it’s not exactly ground-breaking.
That sounds curmudgeonly, or perhaps at least a little unfair. It’s not meant to be ground-breaking, at all. I remember similar grumbles also being said about The Martian as well, and that criticism did that book no harm at all. Despite the negativity that may appear from some quarters, most importantly, what works here, as it did with The Martian, is that the characters are engaging, the setting understandable and the pace begins fast and continues throughout to the end.
Which is exactly what readers of The Martian, looking for ‘what Andy did next’, would want. It’s SF, but not too way-out, not too extreme so that readers are going to go all ‘2001’ and think ‘WTF was all that about?’ Artemis is more like the movie Moon than 2001: A Space Odyssey.
As a result, I suspect that this one will do very well. If it hasn’t been optioned already, it is very filmic and in my opinion would make an excellent movie, given the budget and the right director to bring its prose to visual life.
I’m sure that there must have been enormous pressure on Andy to manage such a feat , but he seems to have done it, admirably. Such enormous scrutiny has been the death of many other writers – well done, Andy, for achieving it.
Artemis by Andy Weir.
Published by Del Rey, November 2017
320 pages
ISBN: 978-0091956943
Review by Mark Yon
