A conversation with #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Martian, Andy Weir, about his exciting new novel
ARTEMIS
(Crown, on sale November 14, 2017)
Q) Tell us a bit about Artemis and the inspiration behind it.
A) Artemis takes places in a city on the moon in the late twenty-first century. The main character is a woman who is a small-time criminal, and she gets in way over her head.
Q) You’ve already taken us to Mars. In Artemis, you take readers to the moon. Why the change in location?
A) Because this story is about colonization, not exploration. And I think we will colonize the moon before we colonize Mars. While Mars has more raw materials, the moon is just so much closer it’s considerably easier to colonize. Also, unlike Mars, the moon could be a tourist destination due to the comparatively short travel time to get there.
Q) What are some of the similarities between The Martian and Artemis? And the differences?
A) They’re similar in that they both involve scientific solutions to complicated scientific problems, but The Martian was a straight-up human versus nature story, where the goal was simple survival. Artemis is a crime story with mysteries involved—a plot that was harder to write but also more interesting, I think.
Q) Mark Watney’s voice defined The Martian. In Artemis we meet Jazz Bashara. Tell us about her.
A) She’s another first-person-smart-ass narrator. But, while Mark is just a hard-working scientist trying to stay alive, Jazz is a sneaky criminal trying to get ahead. She was sort of a delinquent growing up, and now she realizes that she made a lot of mistakes in her youth and she’s trying to make up for some of them. She is very flawed in a lot of ways, but hopefully also very likable. So, very different personalities and priorities.
Q) How did you go about creating this fictional world on the moon? Walk us through your process: What kind of research was involved, do you have a map of Artemis, did you create a character storyboard?
A) Creating Artemis was actually a lot of fun. It’s one of those things where I spent weeks and weeks carefully crafting all the details of the city, of which the reader will see about 1 percent in the story. I worked out the foundations of the economics and why it works, why the city actually exists there, why everything is. And yes, absolutely, I have a pretty detailed map of Artemis.
Q) When beginning a new project, do you start with a story idea and then research the science behind it, or do you come across an intriguing scientific concept and then see if there’s a story there? Something in between?
A) I usually start with the setting. In the case of The Martian, I started by imagining how a manned mission to Mars would work. In the case of Artemis, I designed a functional city on the moon. From there, the plot tends to develop and present itself.
Q) In Artemis, the population lives in various bubbles named after famous astronauts— Aldrin, Conrad, etc. What kind of research did you do when thinking about the kinds of habitats/architecture we would need to construct for people to actually colonize the moon?
A) I wanted to make sure the structures could be made from locally available materials. That means aluminum, pretty much—it’s incredibly plentiful on the moon. And also, I wanted to ensure that a breach was incredibly unlikely. After all, an entire city’s population will die if there’s a leak. Because of this, Artemis has a double-hull system with a meter of crushed lunar rock between the hulls. Also, I did extensive research on the processes needed to smelt anorthite (a mineral found all over the place on the lunar surface) into aluminum and oxygen.
Q) Artemis is set sometime in the late twenty-first century. Is lunar colonization something we could see within the next fifty or a hundred years?
A) I think so, yes. Artemis is based on the presumption that commercial space travel, and competition within that industry, will drive the cost of putting mass into low Earth orbit down low enough that middle-class people can afford a trip to space. Once that becomes a reality, lunar tourism becomes a viable business model. And that’s the economic foundation of Artemis.
Q) You’ve been a vocal fan of The Martian movie; what would you be most excited to see from a film version of Artemis?
A) I’d love to see the visual representation of the city itself. It would be a fantastic visual.
Q) What do you hope readers will take away from Artemis?
A) I hope they have a fun time reading it. That’s all I ever want when I write a story. None of my stories have a moral or a point to be made. I just want the reader to think “well, that was cool” when they’re done.
Q) And finally: What if Jazz Bashara meets Mark Watney in Hartnell’s Pub in Artemis. Would they get along?
A) If Jazz met Mark, I imagine they’d be really, really smart-ass toward each other.
