Artemis
Artemis, copyright 2017, 309pp Crown Publications
Weir’s middle novel, sandwiched between The Martian and Project Hail Mary, couldn’t be more different. Whereas the other two featured resourceful and scientifically literate men stranded far from Earth with little hope of return, Artemis has…Jazz. Jazz is 26, something of a loser, noted for making catastrophically bad life choices. Weir’s protagonists were known for inventiveness and ingenuity: Jazz’s style was more along the lines of petty scams, smuggling, and walks of shame.
She lives on Artemis, the Moon’s one and only colony, along with about 2,000 other people. Her dad, a devout Moslem, runs a welding and metal fabrication shop. She had a boy friend when she was 16, but he turned out to be a pedo, and was stolen away from her by her gay best friend. The head of security, a Canadian named Rudy who has a large stick up his ass, is gunning for her. The only real punishment the libertarian-style colony has is deportation, in Jazz’s case to Saudi Arabia, a place she has never seen and where she would probably be executed for being Jazz. Rudy would love to deport her because she’s a pain in his ass.
She tries to join the EVA guild, a group well paid to take far-too-rich tourists out and point out lunar features. (“Look! There’s a gray rock. And over there! Another gray rock!”) She flunks the test when a valve fails on her suit, something that, given her background, should never have happened. (No, she doesn’t admit it; Weir leaves it to the reader to figure it out.)
She gets involved in a grim battle against an Earth-bound criminal cartel because of another bad decision. She accepted the equivalent of $100,000 dollar bribe to blow up remote harvesters for the Moon’s biggest industry, which incidentally supplies oxygen to the colony. What could go wrong?
She seems the least likely hero you could imagine. But as she says, “I am an asshole. But Artemis needs an asshole right now and I got drafted.”
She ends up working with a group of very odd individuals. Some of them consider her a disappointment, if not a dead bloody loss. Some flat-out despise her. They are all depending on her to save the colony. But she isn’t the complete fuckup that she seems…
Artemis reminds me quit a bit of Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. No superduper self aware computers, and the closest thing to De La Paz is an old Arab welder whose eyes glitter with disapproval with anything that has irrectitude—and given that they are fighting dirty against a crime cartel, rectitude is in short supply and his eyes have much to glitter about. The tone of the colony feels familiar to Heinlein’s penal colony, and you could make a case that Hazel might have grown up to be a lot like Jazz in her wilder young adult years. And most of all, the story is just one hell of a lot of fun.
Weir is well on his way to becoming one of the greats of science fiction. Artemis shows that he isn’t limited in his plot elements and characters.