Before a word of the story, there is a dedication naming seven men: Michael Collins, Dick Gordon, Jack Swigert, Stu Roosa, Al Worden, Ken Mattingly, Ron Evans. Apollo command module pilots. They flew a quarter of a million miles, parked in lunar orbit, and waited alone while two colleagues climbed down a ladder into history. The dedication says they do not get nearly enough credit, and Artemis by Andy Weir spends four hundred pages agreeing with it.
Hold that page in mind, because this is a novel about the people who do the job nobody photographs. Its narrator is a courier. Its supporting cast are welders, glassblowers, life-support technicians and a man who cannot get reconstituted scotch to taste like scotch. Nobody in it is an astronaut.
The Job Nobody Writes Novels About
Jasmine Bashara delivers packages. That is the actual work: collecting boxes at the port, driving them through corridors on an electric cart she has named and gendered, and being paid per delivery. The smuggling is a sideline, run with a childhood pen pal who works as a loadmaster for the Kenyan launch company back on Earth.
She lives in what everyone calls a coffin: an enclosed bunk with a door that locks, a bed, a shelf, and no room to stand. The bathroom is down the hall. The showers are two blocks away. Her stated ambition, repeated with total sincerity, is a flat with its own toilet.
This is the register the novel is best in. Science fiction about the moon usually concerns discovery. This one concerns rent.
Artemis by Andy Weir Built an Economy and Hung a Caper on It
The city runs on Kenya Time, because a Kenyan corporation owns it, so afternoon in Nairobi is afternoon under the domes regardless of where the sun happens to be. Wages and prices are quoted in a unit that is not money at all but a claim on freight capacity: buy a thousand of them and you have bought the right to land a kilogram of anything from Earth. A sofa costs whatever a sofa weighs.
Trades have consolidated along immigrant lines: Saudis took welding, Hungarians took metalwork, Vietnamese engineers run life support. Guilds behave exactly as guilds do, which is to say they run a cartel, gatekeep licences and spread rumours about anyone working outside them. Fire is the civic terror, so anything flammable is contraband and any room that catches alight seals itself with its occupants inside.
The finest scene in Artemis by Andy Weir is a conversation in a small office in a working-class corridor, in which the city’s administrator, a former Kenyan finance minister, explains that the whole settlement is an accidental pyramid scheme. Artemis has never made money from tourism. It has survived on immigrants arriving with their life savings and spending them locally, and the population has now stopped growing. She lays it out with the unhurried patience of someone who has run the numbers many times and does not enjoy them.
That is a genuinely unusual thing to find in a novel with an explosion on the cover.
Who Owns the Moon, Legally Speaking
Artemis by Andy Weir keeps returning to a running joke that is not really a joke, and it is the sharpest thing in the novel. A sign at the train platform informs passengers that they are boarding Kenya Offshore Platform Artemis, property of the Kenya Space Corporation, and that international maritime law applies.
That is a real solution to a real problem. Nobody may claim sovereignty over the moon, a principle established by the treaty governing activity in outer space, so the city is registered as something closer to a very distant oil rig. It has no citizens, no elections and no taxes, which the residents like, and no rights either, which they think about less. Deportation is the punishment for serious crime; for everything else there is one constable who administers to abusers precisely the injuries they inflicted, and the workforce watches him do it with visible approval.
Meanwhile the Apollo 11 landing site has become a ticketed attraction with a viewing hall, a gift shop and a ten-metre exclusion perimeter that includes the original bootprints. Tourists roll out to look at it inside inflatable spheres. The novel is dry and rather good about this: the most sacred object on the moon is now a revenue stream, and the flag fell over during liftoff anyway.
Three Things That Hold It Back
- The plot is the least interesting element. A billionaire hires the narrator to wreck a mining company’s equipment, the job sours, and the back half accelerates into a disaster scenario. It is competently built and it repeatedly interrupts the better book underneath it.
- The narrator talks in one gear. Every observation arrives with a deflecting joke attached, including the ones that should land quietly, and the crude material in particular reads like an author testing how much he is allowed.
- The most compelling character is a walk-on. The administrator who created a national space industry out of nothing but latitude and deregulation appears in roughly four scenes and then is required to be an obstacle.
What Artemis by Andy Weir Is Actually Curious About
Strip away the sabotage and what remains is a book preoccupied with infrastructure as a moral question, which is not where anyone expected Artemis by Andy Weir to end up. Who makes the air, and what do they get for it? Who owns the power station, and what did they trade to get free electricity in perpetuity? What happens to a town of two thousand when a single supply contract is the only thing standing between it and suffocation?
The answers are worked through with real care. Oxygen is a by-product of aluminium smelting, so the smelter gets its enormous electricity bill waived in exchange for keeping everyone breathing, and that arrangement is the hinge the entire plot turns on. It is a supply-chain thriller wearing a spacesuit.
Readers who want more of this should go to Project Hail Mary, where Weir’s warmth finally gets past his own defences, or to Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid for spaceflight written as a human story rather than a puzzle. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Moon takes the politics of a lunar settlement considerably more slowly, and considerably more seriously.
Where It Leaves You
The dedication turns out to have been a promise. This is a book about maintenance: about the welders and porters and technicians whose competence is the only reason anyone up there wakes up in the morning. When it stays with them, it is excellent. A father checking a weld four times because his daughter will be breathing behind it is worth more than every set piece in the last hundred pages.
The frustration is that Weir apparently did not trust that to be enough, and bolted a crime story to the front of it. Artemis the city is a first-rate invention. Artemis by Andy Weir is a good novel about it, and a great deal of the time you can feel the better one moving around underneath.