Artemis

Artemis was published in 2017, three years after The Martian made Andy Weir one of the best-known science fiction writers of his generation. The novel is set in the late 2080s in a lunar city of about two thousand permanent residents, and Weir builds the place with the same attention to detail he brought to a stranded astronaut: the economics of the city, the way air and water are handled, the smuggling that the rules create. Among the details worked out on the page is a welding trade that exists because the dome has to be maintained.

Jazz Bashara is written as a competent, impatient criminal rather than a scientist, which changes the shape of the book. The caper she agrees to is small and illegal; the conspiracy underneath it is much larger and involves the city's biggest industrial employer, a Kenyan aluminium company, and the municipal government's plans for growth. The plot is a heist, and the book's pleasures are the plumbing of a small city and the argument between a character who wants out and a place that cannot afford to let anyone out.

Weir researched the science with engineers and included an audiobook edition narrated by Rosario Dawson. The novel received mixed notices compared with its predecessor, and a film adaptation has been in development. It is a standalone, and it sits beside The Martian and Project Hail Mary as the author's three near-future novels.

Weir's near-future novels share a method rather than a setting, and this is the only caper among them: a small crime, a great deal of engineering, and a heroine whose competence is never in question.