Cover image of "Artemis," a novel about the first city on the Moon

Her name is Jasmine Bashara, but she hates it. Everyone calls her Jazz. She’s a Saudi National who has grown up since the age of seven in Artemis, the first city on the Moon. And there Jazz has built a thriving business as a smuggler with Kelvin Otieno, her partner who works in Kenya for the company that built the city. Unfortunately, Jazz is still poor because she’s keeps her prices low to drive away every rival. And she breaks as few laws as possible to keep a low profile. No guns, for example. But then a Norwegian telecom billionaire named Trond Landvik offers her a fortune to sabotage the aluminum mining company located near the city. He hopes to buy the company and use it for some mysterious purpose. And that nefarious scheme sets Jazz Bashara firmly on a path to catastrophe.

Two thousand people now live on the Moon

So it goes in Andy Weir’s second novel, Artemis. It’s a little past the middle of the twenty-first century, and the city has grown to a population of about two thousand. As Jazz explains to Kelvin shortly after they met as childhood pen pals, “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.” And those bubbles, each named for an old NASA astronaut, is dedicated to a specific use.

For example, Conrad, where Jazz lives, houses the city’s working-class and poor. And “Aldrin is the opposite of Conrad in every respect. . . It has hotels, casinos, whorehouses, theaters, and even an honest-to-God park with real grass. Wealthy tourists from all over Earth come for two-week stays.” And, true to his roots in the hardest of hard science fiction, Weir describes how all this works in sometimes mind-numbing detail.

Artemis by Andy Weir (2017) 368 pages ★★★★☆

This photo shows an Apollo 11 astronaut facing the lunar module, a scene in this novel about the first city on the Moon
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin studies the moon’s soil; on the far right is Apollo 11’s lunar module, the Eagle. In Andy Weir’s novel, this site is preserved as a display for tourists near Artemis, the first city on the Moon. Image: NASA

A scheme with historic consequences

Apart from its endlessly technical trappings, Artemis is a thriller of a familiar sort. Jazz sets out to achieve a seemingly impossible goal against great odds. Practically everybody she knows tries to stop her. Some because they hate her. Others because they love her. Oh, and a few just because. And lots of things go badly wrong along the way. The stakes rise steadily as the true dimensions of Trond Landvik’s mad scheme come into focus. And once they do we understand that the consequences of Jazz’s efforts are truly historic. If Jazz succeeds, life on the Moon will never be the same—and this makes the powers that be profoundly unhappy. Which means nasty people try to kill her. Not once, but several times. So, yes, in a sense, this novel is formulaic and predictable. But it’s a lot of fun if you can tolerate the long, long passages explaining the science and engineering involved.

About the author

Photo of Andy Weir, author of this novel about the first city on the Moon
Andy Weir. Image: XPrize Foundation

Andy Weir is a software engineer who turned to full-time writing upon the success of his first novel, The Martian. He has published three novels to date as well as an abundance of other writing.

Weir was born in 1972 in Davis, California, and grew up not far away in Milpitas. His father was a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories, his mother an electrical engineer. He began work at the age of fifteen. Although he studied computer science at the University of California, San Diego, he didn’t graduate.

I’ve also reviewed two other novels by Andy Weir:

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