Artemis

Many people loved The Martian, a story of a lone astronaut’s survival on Mars, written with enough scientific explanation to render it thoroughly believable. Now Andy Weir is back with Artemis, a high-octane caper which takes place much closer to home '“ our own moon. (Note, a trip to the moon is 'œonly' 238k miles, vs. 54 million miles to Mars.)

This time, Weir has conjured a fully functioning city, with thousands of inhabitants dwelling in five interconnected glass bubbles. And, while less science-oriented than The Martian, the book also has sufficiently detailed explanations of how things work (think construction dynamics, oxygen production, systems of transport, agriculture methods, etc.) to render the encampment plausible.

What unfolds in Artemis (that’s the name of the city as well as the book) is a really fun ride with a lot of action and very high stakes. Our hero, a resourceful young smuggler named Jazz Basahara, finds herself caught up in an epic battle for control of the city. She is perpetually in motion—hurtling about in space suits, racing through tunnels and basements, disabling heavy equipment, and fighting bad guys—as she tries to save the city and its inhabitants. There’s enough kinetic motion to make you feel exhausted just reading about it. In fact, reading Artemis feels a lot like reading a really fun screenplay. And no surprise, the film adaptation is already in the works. If capers and spacesuits are your type of thing, I would buckle up and hop on this celestial rocket of a story.

The bestselling author of The Martian returns with an irresistible new near-future thriller—a heist story set on the moon.

Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you've got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she's stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself'”and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.