Book Note: Andy Weir, Artemis

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Second novel by Martian author Andy Weir. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Not particularly related to the previous novel. Artemis is the colony on the moon, a few domes with a few thousand residents. It was founded by Kenya, and the population is quite international.

Our protagonist is a selfish greedy girl, but she does have some ethical limits. She's a bit interesting, but I don't really like her very well. She's primarily a smuggler, but has a low-paid "porter" job to justify her running around delivering things. Sounds like it all started when a chance pen-pal got a job at the launch facility supplying the colony.

She gets wound up in a plot to make a fortune by attacking the air production facilities and taking over their contract. This gets wound in with some issues of the current owners being a South American drug mob, to be fair. They start to carry it through, no plan survives encounter with the enemy, and they nearly kill everybody in the city. It bugs me that despite gestures towards Lunar conservatism on safety issues, they casually plan an attack on basic technical infrastructure. And the "nearly killing everyone" bit is an accidental byproduct of how they do it plus how the infrastructrue is set up, precisely the sort of unpredictable result that's a big part of the argument against taking risks in that area in the first place. They don't seem terribly shocked afterwards, either, nor are they widely rejected by the people they almost killed. I mean, she's sorry, but I don't think she really sees herself as having done a bad thing for bad reasons and nearly caused a disaster.

So, pluses and minuses on both world-building and character. Plot fairly good. Well-enough written.