Artemis

What's inside (8 sections)

1. Life in the first Moon city
2. A rich man with a simple offer
3. Walking out to break the harvesters
4. A dead client and a strange cable
5. How to steal a city back
6. What it costs to stay
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I came to this one straight after The Martian, which might have been a mistake. I expected Mark Watney with the serial numbers filed off, another cheerful engineer talking his way out of a sealed box. Jazz Bashara is not that. She is younger, broker, angrier, and living in a place that charges you for air if you are careless. It took me about fifty pages to stop comparing the two books. Once I did, I started enjoying Artemis for what it is, a lunar heist story with a lot of welding and plumbing talk, and a main character who keeps making her own life harder.

The book came out in 2017 from Crown, and it runs 309 pages in the first hardcover. That matters because the pace feels like a shorter book stretched by explanations. When it moves, it moves fast. When Weir stops to explain how the city works, he really stops. I read it over a week, mostly late at night, and I kept thinking about the economics of the place during the day. Who owns the air. Who fixes the doors. What happens when someone with money decides the rules should change.

Life in the first Moon city

Artemis is the first and only city on the Moon, sometime in the late 2080s. About two thousand people live there in five connected domes, called bubbles by locals. Everything is about pressure, heat, and money. Tourists come up the space elevator and through a shuttle hop, sleep in cheap capsule bunks or fancy hotels, gawk at the Apollo 11 site from a visitor center, and leave. Workers stay. Jazz has lived there since she was six, when her father Ammar brought her up from Saudi Arabia for welding work. She is now in her mid twenties and still poor in a city where floor space costs more than most people make in a year.

She works as a porter, which means she hauls luggage and packages around the city in a spacesuit fitted for short surface runs and dock work. The pay covers rent on a coffin sized bunk and food that is mostly algae based. To get ahead she smuggles. Her partner in that is Kelvin Otieno, a kid on Earth she has written to for years. He mails her small forbidden things inside legit cargo, cigars, wood carvings, fancy coffee, and she delivers them to rich residents for cash. It is low level stuff. The city administrator and the security chief know it happens. Jazz tells herself she is smart about it, but the opening chapters make it clear she is behind on debts and burning favors.

Her father is a devout Muslim and a strict, skilled welder who repairs suit joints and habitat frames. They had a bad split when she was a teenager. She set fire to part of his shop by accident while trying to impress him with an unsupervised weld, and she left home rather than face him properly. He still loves her in a quiet way and still thinks she wastes her brains. Her old friend Dale Shapiro is now an EVA master, one of the trained guides who lead surface trips and control the airlocks. They hate each other because Dale dated a boy Jazz liked back when they were teens, and neither of them has fully let it go. Her other friend is Martin Svoboda, a Ukrainian scientist at the European Space Agency office who builds odd electronics in his spare time. Rudy DuBois, a Canadian and former cop, runs security with a small team and a long memory.

What I liked here is how lived in the city feels. Weir spends pages on how aluminum smelting gives the city its oxygen as a byproduct, how heat has to be dumped at night, how airlocks cycle, how the gravity in different bubbles is faked with centrifuges in some hotels. Some of that reads like a manual. But the small bits stuck with me. Jazz paying by the liter for suit air. The line for the communal showers. The way mail from Earth takes months and smells faintly of plastic when it arrives.

A rich man with a simple offer

Trond Landvik is a wealthy Norwegian businessman living in Artemis with his teenage daughter Lene. Lene was hurt badly in an accident on Earth and can barely walk there, but in lunar gravity she gets around on crutches and has a real social life. Trond dotes on her and wants to build something that lasts for her. He is also one of Jazz's best smuggling customers, always ordering cigars and paying on time.

He calls Jazz to his big apartment and makes her an offer. Sanchez Aluminum currently holds a permanent contract with the city. The company mines anorthite ore outside town, smelts it for aluminum, and in the process makes more than enough oxygen for everyone. In return they get free energy from the city's solar and nuclear setup. Trond wants to break that deal. He has his own mining gear and his own smelter plans. If Sanchez stumbles, he can step in, take over the oxygen supply, and get rich while looking like a savior.

The job for Jazz is direct sabotage. Go outside, find the four automated harvesters that scoop ore, and wreck them. No people, just machines. Trond offers one million slugs, the local currency. That kind of money would buy Jazz a real apartment and clear every debt. She says yes fast, too fast, and that rush sets the tone for the rest of the book.

During the meeting she notices a man named Jin Chu hanging around with a metal case marked ZAFO. He tries to hide it. Jazz files it away. She is good at noticing cases and labels because smuggling trains you to look at packaging.

I should say the money logic bothered me a little on first read. A million slugs for breaking four robots sounds high until you learn what oxygen contracts are worth. Weir does explain it later through city politics. Still, Jazz agrees before asking basic questions about who gets hurt if the air supply wobbles. That is in character for her, impulsive and sure she can talk her way out, but it makes her hard to root for in this stretch.

Walking out to break the harvesters

To pull off the sabotage, Jazz needs help and gear she does not have. She goes to her father and asks to borrow welding equipment, lying about the reason. That scene is uncomfortable in a good way. Ammar knows she is lying. He lends her the gear anyway, with a look that says he expects to regret it. She also borrows a hull inspection robot, a small spider like machine called a HIB, from a dockworker friend of her father. Svoboda builds her a gadget that fakes her bunk's camera and heat sensor so it looks like she is home asleep.

The plan uses tourists as cover. Jazz books a surface trip to the Apollo 11 visitor dome, which sits a fair walk from the harvester field. During the tour she slips the HIB outside near an airlock so it can open the hatch for her later. The next day, while the fake feed plays in her room, she suits up, leaves through a service lock with Dale looking the other way on timing she guessed, and hikes across gray dust to the machines.

Weir writes this hike well. The suit checks. The tether discipline. The way sound drops out and your own breathing fills your ears. Jazz has to manage oxygen, heat, and time. She reaches the first harvester, cuts into it with a thermal lance, and fries the controls. She gets spotted by the camera on the second one. She kills two more, but an EVA response team starts moving out from town, and she has to run before she finishes the last unit. She barely makes it back inside with Dale catching her at the lock.

Dale knows exactly what she did. He agrees not to turn her in if she drops the old grudge and tries to be friends again. She agrees, though she resents being cornered. It is one of the few times someone her age gets the upper hand with her, and Weir plays it as tired rather than dramatic. Two people who grew up in a tin can, still mad about a boyfriend from years ago, making a deal while she is still dusty from a crime.

A dead client and a strange cable

Jazz goes to collect from Trond and finds him dead, along with his bodyguard. Murdered, professionally. That shifts the book from caper to thriller. She goes looking for Jin Chu at a rich hotel and gets jumped by the killer, a Brazilian enforcer named Marcelo Alvarez. She escapes with the ZAFO case after a messy fight in corridors and service stairs, and hands it to Svoboda.

Svoboda figures out what ZAFO means. Zero Attenuation Fiber Optic. It is a cable that can carry signals over huge distances with almost no loss, no repeaters needed. On Earth that would cut the cost of long undersea and overland lines. The catch is that you can only make the pure glass in low gravity, so Artemis is the perfect factory. Whoever controls the method and the plant controls a fortune. Trond had larger plans beyond aluminum and oxygen. He was setting up to build ZAFO cable on the Moon, with Jin Chu as his technical link.

More pieces come out. Sanchez Aluminum is a front for O Palacio, a huge Brazilian crime group. They have been using the aluminum contract to keep a quiet grip on the city, with Loretta Sanchez as the local face. The city administrator, Fidelis Ngugi, knew more than she let on. Ngugi is the founder of Artemis, a Kenyan politician turned city boss who balances Earth sponsors, tourist money, and local guilds. She tells Jazz later that she was using her as bait to draw out the syndicate people, which Jazz takes badly.

Jin agrees to meet Jazz, then sells her out to Alvarez to save himself. Jazz expects the double cross and sets a trap with Svoboda's gear and Rudy's quiet help. They stun Alvarez and hand him to Rudy. It is a satisfying scene, mostly because Jazz finally plans ahead instead of charging in. She uses the HIB again, plus her knowledge of corridors and pressure doors. Still, the win is small. Alvarez is one man. O Palacio still holds the smelter and the oxygen contract, and Lene has inherited Trond's money and his plans without knowing the full danger.

This middle part is where reviews split, and I get why. The fiber idea is clever and the crime group angle raises the stakes, but Jazz keeps getting rescued by friends with exactly the right tools. Svoboda can build anything. Dale can open any lock. Rudy looks away at helpful moments. If you enjoy puzzle plots, you will not mind. If you want surprises, you may find it thin. The science writer N. K. Jemisin made a similar point in a mixed review, that the heist lacks the team of specialists and sharp turns you expect from the form.

How to steal a city back

Jazz, Lene, Dale, Svoboda, Rudy, and Ammar settle on a blunt plan. If Sanchez loses its ability to make oxygen, the city can cancel the contract for failure to deliver. Lene can then use her father's money and equipment to take over supply and build the ZAFO plant under local control. To do that they have to destroy the Sanchez smelter without killing the town.

The smelter sits outside the domes, fed by ore lines and power cables, venting heat to big radiators. Jazz and Dale break in wearing EVA suits, using maintenance paths Dale knows from guild training. Ammar helps with weld cuts. Svoboda talks them through controls on radio. They overheat the smelter core so it melts itself, timing the failure to look like an accident during a production surge. It works. The core slumps, pipes burst, metal freezes in wrong places. They get out with burned gloves and shaking hands.

Then the side effect hits. The smelter process uses chlorine chemistry in parts of the gas cleanup, and the meltdown pushes chloroform into the air feed. Artemis breathes that feed. People start passing out in homes and shops. Ngugi orders shelter calls. Rudy seals bubbles. Svoboda does fast math on air volumes and says they have less than an hour before the sleeping city starts dying.

This is the best stretch of the book for me. Weir stops explaining the city and starts closing it down room by room. Jazz runs through empty corridors with a spare scrubber on her back. Alarms sound flat in low pressure areas. A hotel centrifuge keeps spinning with unconscious guests inside. The plan to save Artemis is crude. Trond had stockpiled clean oxygen tanks for his own takeover. Jazz decides to vent those tanks into the city feed, which means crossing a surface stretch with no time and no backup, then opening valves by hand when remote controls fail.

Her father meets her at the plant edge and helps her weld a bypass while she coughs through a bad mask seal. Dale drags her clear when a pipe blows. It is physical and messy, and for once Jazz does not quip through all of it. She tries to stay behind to hold a valve open, ready to die so the air keeps flowing. Dale refuses to leave her and pulls her out at the last minute. The air clears. People wake up with headaches and nosebleeds. The smelter is dead. Sanchez has no oxygen to sell.

I believed this section more than the earlier sabotage because the costs are clear. Every shortcut they take breaks something else. A seal fails. A gauge lies. A friend gets burned. The city lives, but the infrastructure they relied on is wrecked.

What it costs to stay

After the smelter dies, Lene pays Jazz the million slugs as promised, even though Trond is gone. For a brief time Jazz is rich. She buys her father a new welding shop to replace the one she damaged as a kid, which is the most honest scene in the book. He does not forgive her all at once. He accepts the shop, checks the welds, and tells her where she cut corners. It feels true to how they talk, short sentences, work first.

Ngugi then calls Jazz in. The administrator thanks her, fines her most of the money for crimes including sabotage, murder adjacent messes, and breaking air safety laws, and tells her she is facing deportation to Earth. Jazz talks her way out of the deportation with a strange pitch. Let her stay as the city's official smuggler. Give her a monopoly on small contraband, no weapons, no dangerous chemicals, and she will keep prices steady and keep worse criminals out. Ngugi agrees because it is practical, not because she likes Jazz. It is a very Artemis solution. Everything is a contract, even crime.

Jazz and Dale call a truce for real this time. Kelvin, still on Earth, gets a last message asking him to buy stock in the company Jin works for before the ZAFO news breaks, so Jazz can rebuild some cash legally. The final pages leave her poorer than she hoped but with a place in the city that fits her skills. She is still a porter. She still smuggles. The difference is that now the city knows and takes a cut.

I closed the book with mixed feelings that have held up. The city design is strong, the air crisis is tense, and Jazz has a sharp voice that made me laugh more than once. She also talks about sex in a way that many readers found off putting, crude jokes that sound like a teen trying to shock adults. I found it tiring after a while, and it undercuts sadder scenes. The plot leans on helpful friends and timely fixes. The villains stay flat. O Palacio never feels like more than a name, and Alvarez is menace without much character.

Still, I would hand this to someone who wants Moon science without a textbook tone, or to a Martian fan who wants to see Weir try a city instead of a survival tent. It is lighter and meaner than his first novel, more interested in contracts than in wonder. If you want deep character growth or a twisty crew caper, you may bounce off it. If you want to learn how a Moon town might pump air, smelt metal, and argue about who pays for power, while a young woman digs herself out of debt one bad choice at a time, this will keep you turning pages. I kept mine by the bed for looks at the bubble maps, and I still think about that fine. Jazz saves the city and gets a bill. That feels about right for Artemis.

FAQ

Is Artemis connected to The Martian?

No, it is a standalone novel with new characters. It shares Andy Weir's focus on practical science but is set in a Moon city in the late 2080s.

Who is Jazz Bashara?

She is a young porter in Artemis who delivers goods and smuggles contraband to pay rent. She takes a sabotage job for Trond Landvik that pulls her into a larger fight over oxygen and a new fiber.

Is Artemis very technical to read?

It explains welding, airlocks, smelting, and orbital costs in plain steps. Readers who enjoy repair and heist planning will like it, while others may find the middle explanations slow.