Oxmoor Page Turners (February 2018 Selection): Artemis by Andy Weir

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Oxmoor Page Turners is a book group and meets February 13 at 6:30 p.m. We pick one title per month from various fiction and nonfiction writers.  Snacks are served at each meeting.  Come join us!!

Our pick for February 2018 is Artemis by Andy Weir.

What would it be like to live on the moon?  What would it look like? How would you survive? These are some of the questions author Andy Weir thought about when writing the book Artemis.  Weir, a computer programmer turned writer has always loved science – especially space.  Well, his dad was a physicist and his mom was an electrical engineer.

A self-described “space geek”, Weir reads and writes a lot about space.  As a child, he read all the science magazines and books he could get his hands on.  He was a big fan of Dr. Who and loves Han Solo.  After his first book, The Martian, he now spends time at  Ames Research Center speaking and just hanging out – however he admits that most of his research for his books is done on Google.

Artemis is named after the greek goddess of the moon, who was the twin sister of Apollo.  Weir ties this together with NASA’s Apollo program – the same program that sent man to the moon. He was so excited to do a novel with a lunar back drop, he ended up designing the entire lunar city.  If you are curious as to what it looks like click here.

 

artemis cover

Artemis by Andy Weir

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.