Books by Weir, Andy
- Weir, Andy. Artemis. New York: Crown, 2017. ISBN 978-0-553-44812-2.
-
Seldom has a first-time novelist burst onto the scene so
spectacularly as Andy Weir with
The Martian (November 2014).
Originally written for his own amusement and circulated
chapter by chapter to a small but enthusiastic group of
fans who provided feedback and suggestions as the story
developed, he posted the completed
novel as a free download on his Web site. Some people who
had heard of it by word of mouth but lacked the technical
savvy to download documents and transfer them to
E-readers inquired whether he could make a Kindle version
available. Since you can't give away Kindle books, he
published it at the minimum possible price. Before long, the
book was rising into the Amazon bestseller list in science fiction,
and he was contacted by a major publisher about doing a print
edition. These publishers only accept manuscripts through
agents, and he didn't have one (nor do agents usually work
with first-time authors, which creates a chicken-and-egg problem
for the legacy publishing industry), so the publisher put him
in touch with a major agent and recommended the manuscript.
This led to a 2014 hardcover edition and then a
Hollywood movie
in 2016 which was nominated for 7 Oscars and won two
Golden Globes including Best Motion Picture and Best Performance
by an Actor in its category.
The question fans immediately asked themselves was, “Is
this a one shot, or can he repeat?” Well, I think
we have the answer: with Artemis, Andy Weir has
delivered another story of grand master calibre and shown
himself on track to join the ranks of the legends of the
genre.
In the latter part of the 21st century commerce is expanding
into space, and the Moon is home to Artemis, a small settlement
of around 2000 permanent residents, situated in the southern
part of the Sea of Tranquility, around 40 km from the Apollo 11
landing site. A substantial part of the economy of Artemis is
based upon wealthy tourists who take the train from Artemis to
the Apollo 11 Visitor Center (where they can look, but not touch
or interfere with the historical relics) and enjoy the luxuries
and recreations which cater to them back in the pleasure domes.
Artemis is the creation of the Kenya Space Corporation (KSC), which
officially designates it “Kenya Offshore Platform
Artemis” and operates under international maritime law.
As space commerce burgeoned in the 21st century, Kenya's visionary
finance minister, Fidelis Ngugi, leveraged Kenya's equatorial
latitude (it's little appreciated that once reliable
fully-reusable launch vehicles are developed, there's no need to
launch over water) and hands-off regulatory regime provided a
golden opportunity for space entrepreneurs to escape the
nanny state regulation and crushing tax burden of “developed”
countries. With tax breaks and an African approach to
regulation, entrepreneurs and money flowed in from around
the world, making Kenya into a space superpower and
enriching its economy and opportunities for its people. Twenty
years later Ngugi was Administrator of Artemis; she was, in
effect, ruler of the Moon.
While Artemis was a five star experience for the tourists which
kept its economy humming, those who supported the settlement
and its industries lived in something more like a frontier
boom town of the 19th century. Like many such settlements,
Artemis attracted opportunity-seekers and those looking to
put their pasts behind them from many countries and cultures.
Those established tend to attract more like them, and
clannish communities developed around occupations: most
people in Life Support were Vietnamese, while metal-working
was predominantly Hungarian. For whatever reason, welding
was dominated by Saudis, including Ammar Bashara, who emigrated
to Artemis with his six-year old daughter Jasmine. Twenty
years later, Ammar runs a prosperous welding business and
Jasmine (“Jazz”) is, shall we say, more
irregularly employed.
Artemis is an “energy intense” Moon settlement of
the kind described in Steven D. Howe's Honor
Bound Honor Born (May 2014). The community is
powered by twin 27 megawatt nuclear reactors located behind a
berm one kilometre from the main settlement. The reactors not only
provide constant electricity and heat through the two week nights
and days of the Moon, they power a smelter which processes
the lunar regolith into raw materials. The Moon's crust is about
40% oxygen, 20% silicon, 12% iron, and 8% aluminium. With abundant
power, these elements can be separated and used to manufacture
aluminium and iron for structures, glass from silicon and
oxygen, and all with abundant left-over oxygen to breathe.
There is no need for elaborate recycling of oxygen: there's
always plenty more coming out of the smelter. Many denizens
of Artemis subsist largely on “gunk”, an algae-based
food grown locally in vats which is nutritious but
unpalatable and monotonous. There are a variety of flavours,
all of which are worse than the straight stuff.
Jazz works as a porter. She picks up things somewhere in
the settlement and delivers them to their destinations using her
personally-owned electric-powered cart. Despite the indigenous
production of raw materials, many manufactured goods and substances
are imported from Earth or factories in Earth orbit, and every time
a cargo ship arrives, business is brisk for Jasmine and her
fellow porters. Jazz is enterprising and creative, and
has a lucrative business on the side: smuggling. Knowing the
right people in the spaceport and how much to cut them in,
she has a select clientele to which she provides luxury goods
from Earth which aren't on the approved customs manifests.
For this, she is paid in “slugs”. No, not slimy
molluscs, but “soft-landed grams”, credits which can
be exchanged to pay KSC to deliver payload from Earth to Artemis.
Slugs act as a currency, and can be privately exchanged among individuals'
handheld computers much as Bitcoin today. Jazz makes around 12,000
slugs a month as a porter, and more, although variable, from her
more entrepreneurial sideline.
One of her ultra-wealthy clients approaches her with a highly
illegal, almost certainly unethical, and very likely perilous
proposal. Surviving for as long as she has in her risky business
has given Jazz a sense for where the edge is and the good sense
not to step over it.
Thus begins an adventure in which Jazz has to summon all of her formidable intellect, cunning, and resources, form expedient alliances with unlikely parties, solve a technological mystery, balance honour with being a outlaw, and discover the economic foundation of Artemis, which is nothing like it appears from the surface. All of this is set in a richly textured and believable world which we learn about as the story unfolds: Weir is a master of “show, don't tell”. And it isn't just a page-turning thriller (although that it most certainly is); it's also funny, and in the right places and amount. This is where I'd usually mention technical goofs and quibbles. I'll not do that because I didn't find any. The only thing I'm not sure about is Artemis' using a pure oxygen atmosphere at 20% of Earth sea-level pressure. This works for short- and moderate-duration space missions, and was used in the U.S. Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions. For exposure to pure oxygen longer than two weeks, a phenomenon called absorption atelectasis can develop, which is the collapse of the alveoli in the lungs due to complete absorption of the oxygen gas (see this NASA report [PDF]). The presence of a biologically inert gas such as nitrogen, helium, argon, or neon will keep the alveoli inflated and prevent this phenomenon. The U.S. Skylab missions used an atmosphere of 72% oxygen and 28% nitrogen to avoid this risk, and the Soviet Salyut and Mir space stations used a mix of nitrogen and oxygen with between 21% and 40% oxygen. The Space Shuttle and International Space Station use sea-level atmospheric pressure with 21% oxygen and the balance nitrogen. The effects of reduced pressure on the boiling point of water and the fire hazard of pure oxygen even at reduced pressure are accurately described, but I'm not sure the physiological effects of a pure oxygen atmosphere for long-term habitation have been worked through. Nitpicking aside, this is a techno-thriller which is also an engaging human story, set in a perfectly plausible and believable future where not only the technology but the economics and social dynamics work. We may just be welcoming another grand master to the pantheon.“I'm sorry but this isn't my thing. You'll have to find someone else.”
“I'll offer you a million slugs.”
“Deal.”
- Weir, Andy. The Martian. New York: Broadway Books, [2011] 2014. ISBN 978-0-553-41802-6.
- Mark Watney was part of the six person crew of Ares 3 which landed on Mars to carry out an exploration mission in the vicinity of its landing site in Acidalia Planitia. The crew made a precision landing at the target where “presupply” cargo flights had already landed their habitation module, supplies for their stay on Mars, rovers and scientific instruments, and the ascent vehicle they would use to return to the Earth-Mars transit vehicle waiting for them in orbit. Just six days after landing, having set up the habitation module and unpacked the supplies, they are struck by a dust storm of unprecedented ferocity. With winds up to 175 kilometres per hour, the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), already fuelled by propellant made on Mars by reacting hydrogen brought from Earth with the Martian atmosphere, was at risk of being blown over, which would destroy the fragile spacecraft and strand the crew on Mars. NASA gives the order to abort the mission and evacuate to orbit in the MAV for an immediate return to Earth. But the crew first has to get from the habitation module to the MAV, which means walking across the surface in the midst of the storm. (You'd find it very hard to walk in a 175 km/h wind on Earth, but recall that the atmosphere pressure on Mars is only about 1/200 that of Earth at sea level, so the wind doesn't pack anywhere near the punch.) Still, there was dust and flying debris from equipment ripped loose from the landers. Five members of the crew made it to the MAV. Mark Watney didn't. As the crew made the traverse to the MAV, Watney was struck by part of an antenna array torn from the habitation, puncturing his suit and impaling him. He was carried away by the wind, and the rest of the crew, seeing his vital signs go to zero before his suit's transmitter failed, followed mission rules to leave him behind and evacuate in the MAV while they still could. But Watney wasn't dead. His injury was not fatal, and his blood loss was sufficient to seal the leak in the suit where the antenna had pierced it, as the water in the blood boiled off and the residue mostly sealed the breach. Awakening after the trauma, he made an immediate assessment of his situation. I'm alive. Cool! I hurt like heck. Not cool. The habitation module is intact. Yay! The MAV is gone—I'm alone on Mars. Dang! “Dang” is not precisely how Watney put it. This book contains quite a bit of profanity which I found gratuitous. NASA astronauts in the modern era just don't swear like sailors, especially on open air-to-ground links. Sure, I can imagine launching a full salvo of F-bombs upon discovering I'd been abandoned on Mars, especially when I'm just talking to myself, but everybody seems to do it here on all occasions. This is the only reason I'd hesitate to recommend this book to younger readers who would otherwise be inspired by the story. Watney is stranded on Mars with no way to communicate with Earth, since all communications were routed through the MAV, which has departed. He has all of the resources for a six-person mission, so he has no immediate survival problems after he gets back to the habitation and stitches up his wound, but he can work the math: even if he can find a way to communicate to Earth that he's still alive, orbital mechanics dictates that it will take around two years to send a rescue mission. His supplies cannot be stretched that far. This sets the stage for a gripping story of survival, improvisation, difficult decisions, necessity versus bureaucratic inertia, trying to do the right thing in a media fishbowl, and all done without committing any howlers in technology, orbital mechanics, or the way people and organisations behave. Sure, you can quibble about this or that detail, but then people far in the future may regard a factual account of Apollo 13 as largely legend, given how many things had to go right to rescue the crew. Things definitely do not go smoothly here: there is reverse after reverse, and many inscrutable mysteries to be unscrewed if Watney is to get home. This is an inspiring tale of pioneering on a new world. People have already begun to talk about going to Mars to stay. These settlers will face stark challenges though, one hopes, not as dire as Watney, and with the confidence of regular re-supply missions and new settlers to follow. Perhaps this novel will be seen, among the first generation born on Mars, as inspiration that the challenges they face in bringing a barren planet to life are within the human capacity to solve, especially if their media library isn't exclusively populated with 70s TV shows and disco. A Kindle edition is available.
