But for Artemis, the only tech assumption is that the price to low-Earth orbit will be driven down by commercial spaceflight companies. For The Martian, I had to progress certain technologies quite a bit. The science in Artemis is every bit as accurate as the science in The Martian. Stylistically, does Artemis get as detailed with the science as The Martian did? Maybe more so because it’s almost certainly the first extraterrestrial body that humanity will colonize. But I love space exploration in all its forms, and The Moon is just as exciting to me as Mars. I wrote a book about Mars, and that was great fun.

So why did you decide to write a novel that take place on The Moon? Or was it more than you decided to write a story set on The Moon and this is what you came up with? With months of travel time, an economy like Artemis simply couldn’t exist. It takes a week to get there and a week to get back.

It’s a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, but one that’s attainable by a determined middle class person. It’s close to the Apollo 11 landing site. I’m not sure it would work anywhere other than The Moon. Do you agree, or do you think it would’ve been a very different story if it took place somewhere else? But it seems to me that it could just as easily been set on Mars or some other planet. From there, the plot ideas flowed really well.Īrtemis is set on The Moon. I realized she was the most interesting part of each story idea, so I decided to center the story around her entirely. But as I worked through multiple story ideas, I noticed that Jazz was becoming more and more prominent. The main character of the finished novel, Jazz Bashara, was originally intended to be a minor side character. But the finished novel is nothing like my original idea for the story. Why it exists economically, how it would grow, its history - albeit short it’s only twenty years old - and the like. Where did you get the original idea for Artemis, and how different is the finished novel from that initial idea? The main character is a woman who’s a small-time criminal and she gets in way over her head. Let’s start with the basics: What is Artemis about?Īrtemis takes place about seventy years in the future in a city on The Moon. But while you might expect this book to be about an astronaut who’s accidentally stranded on, oh let’s say Venus, or maybe Mercury, Weir has actually taking a left turn and veered this new sci-fi tale into the realm of the crime novel. Three years after releasing The Martian - six if you count when he first self-published his debut novel about an astronaut who’s stranded on Mars - writer Andy Weir is taking another trip to outer space with his new novel, Artemis ( hardcover, Kindle, audiobook).

Artemis andy weir audio book