She goes through her predictable heist without a single beat of it feeling surprising or remarkable, accompanied by the types of characters who traditionally help out the hero during a heist: the lovably nerdy tech dude, the money, the muscle.Īnd yet Artemis sort of gets away with it by virtue of having so much fun geeking out over how best to break into a vacuum-sealed double hull from the outside.īut only sort of. So Jazz breezes through the narrative with paper-thin characterization, periodically reminding us that she is a woman of Saudi Arabian descent via her habit of checking out Saudi gossip blogs, but without otherwise distinguishing herself in any meaningful way from the hero of The Martian - or, for that matter, from Weir’s public persona. The rest of the book exists only to create a framework for the engineering thought experiments, and it shows.

Why would an aluminum factory establish itself on the moon? What raw materials would it need, and how could it most efficiently process them? What would be the best way to sabotage its equipment, especially in a low-gravity vacuum? Weir lives for this stuff. This is where the heart of the book lies: in the nitty-gritty process details. You may have noticed that Artemis’s sea of clichéd generalities just got real specific in that last sentence. All she has to do is help him sabotage the anorthite harvesters owned by one of Artemis’s aluminum factories. Jazz is saving up for a special, mysterious purpose - so when one of her regular customers offers to pay her millions if she can help him pull off something a little more criminal, she jumps at the chance. She’s a porter who makes just enough money to rent out a coffin-size living compartment, and she supplements her income with petty smuggling, sneaking boxes of fine cigars to the wealthy few who can afford to live lavishly on the moon. Jasmine Bashar - Jazz for short - has lived on the moon colony Artemis since she was 6 years old. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark Artemis’s plot provides the framework for engineering thought experiments

Artemis by andy weir review