50 pages • 1 hour read
Andy WeirArtemis
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of sexual assault/sex with a minor.
“Jazz” Bashara flees back to a lunar airlock with a compromised space suit. As she races back to the hatch, she argues with Bob, her superior, about the best course of action. Jazz makes it to safety in time, but she fails the test that she was undergoing. She does not receive entry into the EVA (extravehicular activity) Guild; she cannot perform solo space walks or work with the guild.
Jazz criticizes Bob’s verdict but accepts it. She heads back to her home, a “capsule domicile” that Artemisians call coffins. Her “house” is smaller than a jail cell, and while she can sit upright on her bunk, she cannot stand. Artemis as a whole consists of five interconnected “bubbles”—partially underground structures equipped for human life. Jazz’s bubble, Conrad, is where the city’s lower and working-class residents live. On her Gizmo, Jazz receives a message that a shipment of goods is inbound at the landing zone, which is next to Aldrin: the bubble where wealthy tourists visit and shop. She changes into her porter uniform to accept the delivery. She meets Dale, an EVA Guild member, on her way to the dock, and he teases her about failing the test.
At the dock, Jazz greets a family friend who helps her get contraband into the settlement. He charges her more than the last time, but she agrees. She then loads the contraband onto her cart and sets out for Shepard, where Artemis’s wealthiest residents live. She knocks on the door of Norwegian businessman named Trond Landvik and is met by Irina, the housekeeper. She then takes the package to Trond, one of the wealthiest men on the moon: It contains cigars, which are banned as a fire hazard in Artemis.
Trond is hosting a man named Jin, who is visiting from Hong Kong to close a business deal with Trond. Jazz sees a mystery package marked with “ZAFO,” though that means nothing to her. Jin asks about activities on the moon, including the EVA tour available to Artemis’s visitors. Jazz tells him to skip the walk, mostly to keep Dale from getting the money; she then suggests sex workers. She finishes her delivery and then receives a message regarding another.
The chapter closes with letters between Jazz and her elementary school pen pal Kelvin. Kelvin lives in Kenya, and his dad works for the KSC (Kenya Space Corporation, which built Artemis). They discuss pets and aspirations. Kelvin wishes to build rockets; Jazz wants to be rich.
Chapter 2 Summary
Jazz drives Trigger, her cart, to her next pickup. This takes place at the Armstrong bubble—the industrial bubble, with manufacturing plants and the Life Support Center. Artemis gets its oxygen as a byproduct of manufacturing aluminum.
When she arrives, she runs into Rudy DuBois, the head of Artemis’s security. She describes him as attractive, strong, and the enforcer of the settlement. Rudy accuses Jazz of smuggling—fortunately, she notes, only Artemis’s administrator could deport her for it—and leads her into the industrial facility. Rudy singles out one of the male workers and reads the man his wife’s hospital report. Rudy then replicates those injuries on the man: “a black eye, a hematoma on the cheek, two bruised ribs, and a concussion” (25). Rudy pays Jazz the slugs to carry the man to the doctor.
Soon after this errand, Jazz’s Gizmo alarm goes off. She must respond to a fire alarm on another level of Conrad. Bob, the EVA Guild member who failed Jazz earlier in the day, manages the scene. Jazz and three other EVA members and trainees must evacuate 14 people from a fire inside the Queensland Glass Factory, which previously had a perfect fire safety record. They perform this maneuver by creating an oxygen-free zone, connecting to the air shelter, and then oxygenating a tunnel for evacuation.
Her next stop is a bar, Hartnell’s Pub. She laments her lack of money and cites a specific income goal of 416,922 slugs; Jazz dreams of living in a condo with room to stand up and her own bathroom. Trond messages her while she is daydreaming over a beer. He wants to meet.
When Jazz arrives at his home, Trond is eating dinner with Fidelis Ngugi, the Artemis administrator. Ngugi built the KSC through determination, tax breaks, incentives, and policy. Trond’s daughter, Lene, is also present. Once Lene and Administrator Ngugi leave, Trond makes Jazz a business proposition. He plans to purchase Sanchez Aluminum and wants Jazz to sabotage the machines that harvest the anorthite rocks for aluminum. Once these harvesters are down, Sanchez Aluminum will be in breach of its contract with KSC to provide oxygen in exchange for the electricity to smelt aluminum. At first, Jazz declines; she’s a smuggler, not a saboteur. Trond then offers her one million slugs. She accepts.
The chapter closes with emails between Jazz and Kelvin, this batch from middle school. Jazz shows aptitude for math and gifted classes. Kelvin talks about the KSC, which “has lots of power in the Kenyan government” (48). He asks if Jazz will ever move back to Earth. She tells him she cannot move back because life in space has changed her bone density and musculature.
Chapter 3 Summary
Jazz meets Trond at one of his warehouses. He shows her his anorthite harvesters—identical to the ones he is paying Jazz to break. Jazz inspects the harvesters and devises a plan. She heads back to her coffin to begin. She then visits her friend, Martin Svoboda, who is an electrical engineer. She shows him the schematics she drew in her coffin. He tells her he can make the device but doesn’t want payment. He wants to trade, offering to build what Jazz designed if she uses his prototype reusable condom the next time she has sex. She eventually agrees.
Jazz drives Trigger to her father’s apartment. He questions her motives for visiting but allows her to enter. She wants to borrow some welding material. Jazz and her father discuss his current project—a device that will allow him to orient himself toward Mecca for prayer—and her need for the tools. Jazz lies about why she needs the materials, saying she’s building an air shelter for a friend. Her father is initially suspicious but softens when she claims she is doing so to get around regulations; as a welder himself, he feels there is too much bureaucratic red tape.
Jazz and Kelvin’s next batch of letters comes from their high school years. Kelvin still shows great interest in rockets. Jazz explains the complicated physics of lunar shuttles from Earth. Kelvin teases her for being lazy; he works hard to attain the aptitude that comes easily to her. Jazz discusses taking the next step with her boyfriend, and Kelvin suggests “boobs.”
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Artemis begins with Jazz’s narrow escape, establishing the centrality of survival to the novel. In fact, the first three chapters repeatedly demonstrate the importance of survival awareness. Artemis functions only because of safety protocols: For example, Jazz describes a complex cleansing process anyone who has been on the moon’s surface must undergo to avoid introducing lunar dust into the colony’s air supply. The entire population submits to such rules to survive, though there are relatively few laws and the colony exists outside any country’s jurisdiction. Instead, Artemis relies on mechanisms like the guilds to enforce safety standards (as Bob does when he fails Jazz) and the community itself to police morality. Even Rudy, Artemis’s only real law enforcement, seems as likely to resort to vigilante justice as to official channels, as his punishment of the abusive husband demonstrates. The size of Artemis, roughly 2,000 permanent residents, allows this governing system to operate.
However, the libertarian atmosphere gives rise to obvious tensions. As someone who has grown up in this environment, Jazz values independence and disdains rules, as evidenced by her frustration with Bob. Though she recognizes the importance of safety protocols, she chafes when they are enforced. She also draws repeated attention to the wealth disparities that have arisen in Artemis’s entrepreneurial environment: Her description of the “bubbles” in which residents and visitors live, including her own cramped quarters, reveals a class-segregated society. What’s more, the restrictions that do exist in Artemis are not applied evenly. The wealthier one is, the less the rules matter—including those designed to safeguard survival itself. Trond, for example, smokes and has a lighter despite this being a significant fire hazard. His money gives him access to the administrator, contraband, and far more resources than the average person.
The freedom on Artemis extends to sex. Jazz recommends sex workers to a near stranger and describes sex work as “a service performed for a payment” (15). Sex seems constantly on characters’ minds, and the Artemisians are more open about it than their counterparts on Earth. Svoboda asks Jazz to use his reusable condom, though neither is entirely comfortable with the conversation. Young Jazz and her pen pal discussing their burgeoning sex life. Even during the planning of corporate espionage, Trond objectifies Jazz, asking as she straddles a backward chair, “Do women know how sexy they look when they sit like that?” (54). Sexuality dominates the narrative, with Weir drawing particular attention to Jazz’s gender and sexual activity. Though she does not seem overly concerned with either, the men around her discuss and comment on it repeatedly.
Though she jokes about sex to fit in with her predominantly male counterparts, Jazz’s main motivation is instead money. After the misadventure that opens the novel, Jazz notes that she bought the compromised suit secondhand. Money is thus a matter of survival, and Jazz does everything she can to earn more. She smuggles cigars, lives in a coffin, and makes deliveries as a porter, all for a little more money. Her beer at the pub coincides with morose musings about the sad state of her bank account. She has “this bad habit of checking [her] bank account every day, as if compulsively looking at it would make it grow” (33). When she visits her father, the second thing he asks her is if she needs money. Even as a young girl, Jazz tells Kelvin that she wants to be rich when she grows up. Jazz’s financial motivation are well established by the time she accepts Trond’s job in exchange for a million slugs. The self-interest that governs Jazz at this point also lays the groundwork for her moral evolution and the related theme of The Hero’s Journey: Rebirth Through Self-Sacrifice.
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