Any Weir

Fiction 2017/ 305 pages

Jazz Bashara was born in Saudi Arabia, but emigrated to the moon colony of Artemis with her father when she was six.  Intelligent, strong, opinionated, resourceful, intense, nuanced, naughty, and irreverent, (I like her!!) at 26, Jazz earns her meager wages mostly by smuggling for the rich on Artemis.  She is also an excellent welder, having been taught by her father, the best welder on Artemis.

It is interesting to learn how Artemis is setup (a good map is included in the book) with pods and domes and management of air, food, transportation, energy, laws.  It makes me think and wonder ... how would I design a city in a hostile geographic environment?

Jazz and her friends (she has quite a few) are fascinating to watch, and I find her character to be well developed and intriguing.  It is fun to watch the tourists come for a vacation and experience gravity at 1/6th of earth.

She becomes involved ... no, more, she takes the lead, in a major corporate criminal action designed to reallocate power and resources in Artemis. Is the civil disobedience worth it?  I don't know .  All's well that ends well!

My major objection is, like in The Martian, Weir gets too technical and too scientific for me.  In Artemis,  I did not understand anything that happened between pages 220 and 280, where Jazz is orchestrating her crime.  Someone geekier than me, more educated, or more intrigued by the workings of air systems and valves, rovers, chemicals, EVA's and welding may feel this is quite a great section!

I liked The Martian a bit better than Artemis.  Though in Artemis,  there is more context-setting, and more interaction with other parts of the system and other characters, The Martian gives us technical challenges spread throughout the book, and each is vastly different, part of what holds my interest.

In Artemis, there is but one significant technological challenge, and it all occurs in the above-mentioned pages.

I must recommend this with various grains of salt!

June 2025