Artemis

Jazz Bashara was dying, and she knew it.

Her secondhand EVA suit had failed during the extravehicular activity test. The coolant system was shot. Her oxygen was running out. She stumbled across the lunar surface toward the airlock, arguing with Bob Lewis, the EVA Guild trainer, over her Gizmo. Bob told her to hurry. She told him the suit was garbage. He didn't care.

She made it inside with seconds to spare. But she failed the test. Bob's verdict was final: Jazz would not become an EVA master. She couldn't perform solo space walks. She couldn't work with the guild. The moon, Bob told her, "doesn't care why your suit fails. She just kills you when it does."

Jazz bought that suit secondhand because she couldn't afford a new one. That's the kind of life she lives in Artemis, the first lunar city. She's a smuggler and a porter, hauling contraband cigars and other black-market goods to wealthy residents. She lives in what Artemisians call a "coffin"—a capsule domicile smaller than a jail cell. She can sit upright on her bunk, but she can't stand. The ceiling is too low.

Artemis is divided into five bubbles. Conrad, where Jazz lives, houses the working class—plumbers, metalworkers, welders, repair shops. Bean is for the middle class. Shepard holds the rich. Aldrin is a tourist resort with casinos and theaters. Armstrong is the industrial hub. The wealth gap is stark. As Jazz puts it, "You don't expect J. Worthalot Richbastard III to clean his own toilet, do you?"

Jazz's net worth sits at about 2.5 percent of her goal: 416,922 slugs. That's the amount she needs to repay her father for the welding shop she destroyed as a teenager. She carries the shame of that fire every day. Her teenage recklessness—letting her boyfriend and his friends smoke weed in the shop without checking the acetylene lines—cost her father everything. She's been trying to make it right ever since.

She's working toward that goal through her smuggling operation with Kelvin, her childhood pen pal from Kenya. Kelvin's father works for the Kenya Space Corporation, which built Artemis. The two have been writing letters since elementary school. Jazz told him back then what she wanted to be when she grew up: rich.

One day, she gets a delivery order for Trond Landvik, a Norwegian telecommunications billionaire. She brings him a package of Dominican cigars—banned on Artemis as a fire hazard, but Trond's money means the rules don't apply to him. He's hosting a man named Jin Chu from Hong Kong, who carries a mysterious box labeled "ZAFO." Jazz notices it but doesn't think much of it at the time.

Later, Trond messages her. He wants to meet.

At his apartment, Jazz finds Trond eating dinner with Administrator Fidelis Ngugi, the woman who built Artemis from scratch. Ngugi is a legend on the moon. She created Kenya's space industry by offering corporations something they couldn't get elsewhere: freedom from red tape. She's the reason Artemis exists.

Once the others leave, Trond makes Jazz an offer. He wants to buy Sanchez Aluminum, the company that harvests anorthite rocks from the lunar surface. The byproduct of aluminum smelting provides Artemis with its oxygen. Trond's plan is simple: he wants Jazz to sabotage the four harvesters that collect the rocks. Without them, Sanchez will breach its contract with KSC. Trond can step in and take over.

Jazz turns him down. She's a smuggler, not a saboteur.

Trond offers her one million slugs.

She accepts.

One million slugs. More than double her goal. Enough to repay her father, buy a condo with room to stand up, and never worry about a secondhand suit again. The money overrides every hesitation. She tells herself the job is simple. Break four machines. Get paid. Walk away.

But nothing on the moon is simple. And Jazz is about to learn that the hard way.

This is the story of Artemis, Andy Weir's science fiction thriller about a lunar colony, a high-stakes heist, and a smuggler who must transform from a self-interested criminal into a self-sacrificing hero. It's a story about economic inequality, where the rich bend rules and the poor die from faulty equipment. It's about a woman carrying the weight of a mistake she made as a teenager, desperate to make things right. And it's about what happens when a small-time crook gets caught between a murderous crime syndicate and the future of an entire city.

Jazz's journey begins with a secondhand suit that almost kills her. It ends with her stabbing her own life support to save two thousand people. In between, she'll break into hotel rooms, fight assassins, blow up harvesters, and discover that the simplest jobs often hide the most dangerous secrets.

What would you risk for one million slugs? And what would you become to survive?