MOON SHOT
“I would love for ‘Artemis’ to be a series. I’m working on the next book already.” - ANDY WEIR Artemis was choosing to narrate his book in the voice of his female lead character, Jazz. Even many fans of the book have some issues with a middle-aged white guy trying to write in the voice of a woman in her 20s. Writing in the New York Times, for example, N.K. Jemisin went glib: “She talks and acts like a Middle American white man.” Even Kirkus, in a swipe I have to call bizarre, took a shot at Weir for thanking his publisher and U.K. editor and other women in his acknowledgements “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator.” What’s wrong with that? Kirkus thought acknowledging help made it sound “as if women were an alien species.” Hold on there. Reviewers often don’t know much about how books actually get written—they’re more the sit-back-and-snipe types—but fine-tuning voice takes work, and one always asks for help. If you’re narrating a book with a character from England, and you yourself are from California, you get help to hunt for anywhere you can improve—that doesn’t mean you think people from England are an “alien species.” Weir couldn’t win, in other words, but he knew that going in—and he’s disarmingly open about how harrowing it was to go with his impulse to build the book around a young woman. “That was probably the biggest challenge in the book for me,” he told me. “I don’t know if I did a good job or not. Some people Call Dr. Ana to have strong reactions, saying, ‘This Ask about book your Botox visit is horrible. Andy Weir doesn’t know fillers for anything about women.’ There are instant results demographics that would never accept a female lead written by a BeautyWithin man under any circumstances—you 7492 Soquel Dr., Suite D may not have a female lead written Aptos, CA 95003 by a man, period.” 831.313.4844 Botox He’s right about that,$10 of per unit Dermalgoing Fillersto• Chemical Peels course, but he’s surely piss some people off by saying so. It probably helps his cause
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with tape on his nose, playing Jake Gittes. I highly recommend reading the Weir novel and then watching the movie again as a way to explore how one creative work can infuse and inform another. Both have about them a feeling of gradually uncovering deeper truths. In the case of Artemis, the drama also hinges on a power play over resources. It’s complicated, but here’s the basics of the setup: Jazz Bashara is estranged from her father, a master welder, who like her lives on a small colony on the moon called Artemis. She works as a porter—a low-income, lowprofile job that serves as a useful cover for her other occupation: a large-scale smuggling operation with the help of an Earthside pen pal she’s been close to for years. Through her smuggling operation, she meets a wealthy businessman named Trond Landvik who offers her a million credits to engage in some major sabotage—an insanely difficult mission that she, wanting the money, decides to accept. She comes up with a good plan, and almost pulls it off, sabotaging all but one of the automated mining harvesters operated by Sanchez Aluminum. Then she goes to see her wealthy businessman client—only to find him murdered. It turns out that the enforcer of a Brazilian crime syndicate—which, this just in, owns Sanchez Aluminum—has murdered the businessman and is now after her, only he’s a little off his game in the low gravity of the moon, putting him at a disadvantage. By teaming up with her estranged father, and a lovable geek named Martin Svoboda, who becomes an unlikely love interest, Jazz brings her schemes to an unlikely conclusion. Anyone who says they saw it all coming—the kind of hair-ball analysis regularly coughed up online—is full of it. Weir’s most daring choice with
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