ARTEMIS (2017)
By Andy Weir
Crown, 320 pages.
★★★
The Martian, Andy
Weir's debut novel, was a smashing success. His follow-up, Artemis, is too good to be called a sophomore slump, but it's at
best a mixed bag. Fans of nerdy science will find plenty to contemplate, though the
literature side of it yaws more toward Dan Brown than to Ursula K. LeGuin or
Robert Heinlein.
It is set in the near future in Artemis, a small city of
2,000 clustered in five bio bubbles on the Moon (Armstrong, Aldrin, Conrad,
Bean, Shepard) that has solved the problem of producing enough oxygen to keep
everyone inside alive. Artemis is run by the Kenyan Space Corporation (KSC) and
headed by Administrator Fidelis Ngugi, the woman who figured out how to make
Kenya a leader in the space program. She is one of the many politically correct
boxes Weir ticks off; there are also gay characters, Latinos, Scandinavians, a
hunky Ukrainian researcher, Brazilian and Chinese baddies, our protagonist,
Jasmine ("Jazz") Bashara, is of Saudi extraction, and her welder
father, Ammar is a devout Muslim for whom Jazz is a disappointment. Jazz, aged
27, has lived on the Moon since she was six and considers herself an
Artemisian. She's certainly not a good Muslim; she's a hard drinker, sleeps
around, and walks on the razor's edge. Her biggest fear is that head of
security Rudy DuBois will someday bust her small-scale smuggling operation and
deport her back to Earth.
Artemis is like a big extended village, but it's not a
utopia—more like Deep Space Nine set
on the lunar surface and stripped of its aliens. Lots of Earth stuff is
conveniently ignored: the legal drinking age, corporate monopolies, petty
crime, casual sexual relations, etc. Only its wealthiest members get to eat
anything other than Gunk, flavored algae, and everyone is in one way or another
in thrall to KSC as the Artemisian currency, slugs, is credit from the KSC.
(It's shorthand for soft-landed grams and each one is pegged to a gram of Earth
cargo.) Still, tourists fly to the moon to gawk and bounce around on the
surface in "hamster bubbles," and many of residents such as Jazz prefer
its Mild West vibe of drinking, hookups, cussing, libertarian values, and
improvised ways of making a living.
Jazz, however, wouldn't mind having a bigger living space,
and that sucks her into a Get Slugs Quick scheme from a regular smuggling
customer, the ridiculously rich Tron Landvik. All she has to do is slip outside
the city and destroy four mineral harvesters belonging to the Sanchez Aluminum
Company. As such things go, Tron's stated reason for wanting them taken down
isn't his real reason. Let the caper begin. It will involve murder, a crime
syndicate, geeky technology, double-dealing, hair-raising danger, an unlikely
set of partnerships, and beat-the-clock scenarios.
How you'll feel about all of this takes me back to my Dan
Brown analogy. Do you buy into computer-like minds that are able to do the
science, overcome physical threats, and concoct improvised solutions in a
parsec, or does it stretch your credulity? I can't assess Weir's science—my Ph.D.
is in history, not STEM—but his solutions at least sounded logical to my right-brained thinking. His human responses,
however, often rang false. To me, this novel has Hollywood thriller written all
over it. Its central drama is pretty much the template for such projects,
especially the put-aside-existing-prejudices-for-the-good-of-all setup.
Mind, I have no objection if Artemis becomes a good
Hollywood thriller, though somehow I doubt it has the capacity to match the
gravitas of Blade Runner or even The Martian. Artemis is a decent read and bad girl Jazz will grow on you as she
evolves. Ultimately, though, Artemis
is a pretty standard thriller dressed in enough respectable scientific garb to
make it appear weighty in a setting with 16% of Earth's gravity. But, hey, I
like Dan Brown.
Rob Weir*
*Note: Though we bear the same last name, to my knowledge I
am in no way related to Andy Weir.
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