Book Review | Artemis by Andy Weir

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, 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.

***

It's been six years since Andy Weir became a self-publishing success story on the back of The Martian. A scientifically fastidious yet satisfying work of fiction that spoke of a stranded astronaut's struggle to survive on the ruthless red planet, it—and Ridley Scott's subsequent adaptation of said—made sci-fi fun for some; specifically for folks who had previously sneered at the genre for its seeming self-seriousness.

Those readers will be over the moon to hear that Artemis is, in its attention to technical detail and its prioritisation of play as the order of the day, The Martian's perfect partner, though more demanding fans of the form are likely to find it slight: derivative, dreadfully slow to start, and rather lacking in the heart department. But for better or for worse, Weir's new novel is in many ways more of the same problem-solving stuff that made him a household name.

In theory, at least, one of Artemis' most dramatic departures from The Martian is in its central character. Mark Watney was a Real America Hero: a white dude who did good. Jazz Bashara, on the other hand, is a young woman of Saudi Arabian descent who makes her living by breaking the law. This transparent flipping of scripts has little impact in practice, alas. While she might be a rule-breaker to begin with, Jazz is every inch the saviour before the book is through, just like her predecessor. And just as Watney was, for all intents and purposes, a man of Mars, Jazz, the hell with her heritage, is "a local gal. Grew up right here on the moon." The net effect of her gender, meanwhile, is that Weir seems to see it as a license to make altogether too many jokes about breasts and banging.

Needless to note, this is not sophisticated sci-fi. But to paraphrase Jazz, who likens the shining city the novel is named after to "a bunch of metallic boobs," Weir is clearly no poet—and he knows it. In truth, Artemis, "the first (and so far, only) city on the moon" does bear rather a resemblance. "It's made of five huge spheres called 'bubbles.' They're half underground, so Artemis looks exactly like old sci-fi books said a moon city should look: a bunch of domes. You just can't see the parts that are belowground."

It's in these nether regions that we find the story's hero-to-be. Jazz is "one of the little people" who eke out an existence in Artemis by doing the dirty jobs the "rich tourists and eccentric billionaires" that make up most of the city's population are unwilling to. As she herself has it in her distressingly on-the-nose narration, "you don't expect J. Worthalot Richbastard III to clean his own toilet, do you?"

Book Review | The Martian by Andy Weir

I'm stranded on Mars.

I have no way to communicate with Earth.

I'm in a Habitat designed to last 31 days.

If the Oxygenator breaks down, I'll suffocate. If the Water Reclaimer breaks down, I'll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I'll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I'll eventually run out of food and starve to death.

So yeah. I'm screwed.

***

We all have our dreams and desires.... or we all had them. How sad!

Andy Weir, at least, did something with his. Fascinated by space exploration from an early age, "like most kids growing up [he] wanted to be an astronaut. Instead, he wrote a book—The Martian—which he self published on Amazon in 2012."

By all accounts, it went down very well, in the wake of which overwhelmingly positive and in all probability profitable response, an assortment of proper publishers came a-calling. The result is a novel with problematic priorities that begs for the suggestions of a determined editor. That it is a gripping and largely satisfying text nevertheless speaks to how marvellous The Martian might have been.

The book is about no more and no less than a man left to die on Mars. Potty-mouthed botanist Mark Watney is far from the first fellow to travel to the red planet — as a crewmember of Ares 3 he's the fourteenth, in fact, to set foot on its soil — but he's certainly the first man to be stranded there, abandoned there. A series of unfortunate events just "six days into what should be the greatest two months of [his] life" (p.1) leave our hero alone in the absolute dark of the stars, and struggling to survive.

After a critical equipment failure and the evident death of one of their number, the other astronauts of Ares 3 have no choice but to hightail it home, unaware that Mark is still alive... however he won't be for long if Mars has its uncaring way. All our man has is two rovers, a prefab hab and a small container of potatoes, plus the promise of Ares 4's arrival in four years or so—assuming the tragedy of his apparent passing hasn't completely derailed NASA's provisional plans for the program.

He doesn't, however, have enough food to last him a single Martian year, far less four, and his existence, in the interim, is entirely dependent on disposable equipment: air regulators and water reclaimers meant to function for a few months at most. He has no conceivable way of communicating with anyone either, and even if he had, help is an impossibly long way away. Mark Watney is on his lonesome, ladies and gentlemen, and he has his work cut out, no doubt.