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 Jazz’s 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 more unlikely than the first.

***

4/5 Stars

I really enjoyed this. I love a good heist and stories that follow reasonably good hearted criminals, so I knew fifty pages in that I would love it. Jazz is not always easy to like but she’s straight forward and blunt. At times you can tell she was written by a man, there’s bits where her character just jarred for me, but like 2 or 3 times, so nothing really.

As with the Martian, Weir has REALLY done his research. If there were prizes for book accuracy on subjects, he’d be winning all of them. I’m an astronomy nerd, so I knew enough to know how much work must go into that and how good his work was. Very impressive. I love how he dished it out too – not in one big indie dump but enough to get a great sense of life in Artemis and how it was set up, how it worked and the safety issues around it. Brilliantly done.