Artemis

Girl On The Moon

In Andy Weir’s last sci-fi bestseller, The Martian, an astronaut was mistakenly left behind on Mars, and finds ways to survive alone (Ridley Scott directed the movie with Matt Damon), as his colleagues figure out how to rescue him.

In his second novel Artemis set in 2080 (the not too distant future), Weir has created a colony on the moon, called Artemis, where the superrich go to live and vacation. In its gleaming underbelly are people like Jazz Bashara, a young woman of Saudi Arabian origin, who works as a porter and moonlights as a smuggler of contraband items forbidden to be brought to the moon.

Weir describes the working of the lunar settlement in minute—sometimes boringly so—details, and for all one knows when Earthlings finally do get to colonize the moon, they might actually live in a town like Artemis. The small population, policed by just one administrator and one cop, lives with lighter gravity, under sealed bubbles named after real-life moon-landing astronauts, depends on tourism as its main revenue source and uses a form of cryptocurrency called slug.

Jazz is the daughter of a devout Muslim welder, who is fed-up of her wayward lifestyle. So she lives by herself in a ‘coffin’ – a tiny space just enough to crawl in to sleep. She is smart, sassy, and would rather use her remarkable brain on her small criminal scams than to put it to better use; in fact, nothing annoys her more than people commenting on her potential.

She is offered a very lucrative assignment by billionaire Trond Landvik, to sabotage the harvesters of the Sanchez Corporation that supplies oxygen to Artemis, so that he can pick up the big contract for himself. Jazz is as unscrupulous as she is greedy, so she takes it up for a million slugs, and causes such a disaster that she almost wipes out the population of the town. She has to undo the damage then, with the help of her reluctant father, former boyfriend Dale and a tech wizard, Martin Svoboda, who is in love with her. 

Weir concentrates so much on Jazz’s antics that other characters are left half-baked; the dialogue is juvenile and the plot quite predictable, but when it comes to the science, Weir’s imagination is unbeatable.  And he has the ability to make all that jargon quite entertaining.

Artemis is on its way to the screen too, let’s hope they don’t get a white actress to play the brown-skinned Arab badass.

Artemis

By Andy Weir

Publisher: Crown

Pages: 320