Artemis by Andy Weir review – follow-up to The Martian

Andy Weir’s first novel, The Martian, enjoyed a measure of success liable to make other writers slump slack-jawed and drooling, like Homer Simpson before a doughnut. Initially self-published, it became a word-of-mouth hit, got picked up by a regular publisher, sold 5m copies and was made into a blockbuster film by Ridley Scott. Straight out of the gates with a global hit.

Indeed, the book was such a blockbuster you probably know its story: an astronaut, stranded on Mars, has to use his scientific expertise to stay alive for two years until rescue can reach him. This simple narrative tug – will he survive or not? – gives Weir a line on which to hang a large number of interesting facts and little lectures. The reader learns a lot about the Martian environment, how to grow potatoes, how to get into orbit and so on. That’s the sweet spot The Martian hit: a likable protagonist in peril, saved by his own resourcefulness in a tale that leaves readers better informed about science than they were before they read it.

Weir, clearly, adheres to the principle that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it (and, presumably, if it is broke, patch it up with duct tape). His second novel concerns a likable protagonist in peril, saved by her own resourcefulness, in a tale that leaves readers better informed about science than they were before they read it. The setting is lunar rather than Martian, but otherwise it’s basically the same pitch.

“Artemis” itself is a five-dome moonbase, servicing a little heavy industry and rather more tourism. Jazz, our heroine, is a sparky young woman who (while her observant Muslim father tut-tuts) gets drunk, has sex and generally tries to have a good time. It’s a struggle, though: good times are expensive on the moon, and despite supplementing her job – she is a porter – with some judicious smuggling, Jazz is always short of money. She lives in a coffin-sized apartment, shares communal washing facilities and eats the cheapest algae-grown gunk. Poverty persuades her to take on a criminal commission: a little light sabotage on the lunar surface. Naturally, things don’t go smoothly: she botches the sabotage, her employer gets murdered, and an assassin is coming after her. The moon has become a battleground for organised crime over a MacGuffin, in this case a new tech that could revolutionise Earth’s entire communication system.

As in The Martian, Weir’s is a prose entirely without aesthetic ambition, flat and cheerful and a bit sweary. Nabokov it ain’t. Take the novel’s opening paragraph: “I bounded over the gray, dusty terrain toward the huge dome of Conrad Bubble. Its airlock ringed with red lights stood distressingly far away.”

A creative writing teacher might look at that, count the six adjectives/adverbs in its line-and-a-half and suggest cutting a few of them. But then again, said creative writing teacher certainly won’t have sold 5m copies of their debut novel, or they wouldn’t be supplementing their income teaching creative writing. If Weir wants to describe an explosion by saying: “the harvester exploded like … exploded”, then no one is going to stop him. Discovering a sentence as awkward as “life’s a pain in the ass when you have a cop constantly on your ass” in their first draft, another writer would wince and reach for the revising pencil. Not Weir. He is perfectly happy to wave the line through to the final product.

This time, though, authorial inexperience results in a markedly lumpier read than was the case in The Martian. Orchestrating a rather more complicated plot and many more characters tests Weir’s ability both to pace his story and to hold things together. The text is so laden with information and facts, it feels heavy even in one-sixth lunar gravity. Scrupulously, indeed pedantically, everything is explained. Weir can never let a passing detail pass without stopping it and pinning a label to it. Early on, this makes the book merely slow, but as the story picks up speed towards its climax it becomes actively annoying – jamming the narrative momentum with little lectures on why the spaces between the inner and outer hull of Artemis’s domes are pressurised at 20.4 kPa, 10% less than the pressure inside the dome itself, or laboriously listing all the MacGuffin’s technical specifications (“I checked the core’s index of refraction: it’s 1.458, a little higher than fibre optics usually are, but only by a tiny bit … a typical attenuation for a high-end cable is around 0.4 decibels per kilometre … the precision of my OLTS is 0.001 decibels per kilometre …”). The urge to yell GET ON WITH IT swells in the readerly chest.

SF fans with long enough memories will find Artemis a curiously old-fashioned sort of book, something like a Heinlein juvenile with added F-words. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind. It’s a quick read that will teach you about the moon, a story with enough explosions and chase scenes and fistfights to leaven the mini-lectures. Plus the narrator-protagonist has real charm. There’s no question that, commercially speaking, this novel is going to be a hit. But as a work of fiction it’s a crescent rather than a whole moon.