Is There Life After Mars?

The Martian author Andy Weir talks about his new book Artemis, how he built an entire lunar base in his head before he wrote it, and how hard it is to make a decent cuppa on the moon …

- Daniel Bennett

The Martian author Andy Weir talks about his new book Artemis, how he built an entire lunar base in his head before he wrote it, and how hard it is to make a decent cuppa on the moon …

What is Artemis about?

Artemis takes place in a city on the moon. The main character is a woman called Jazz, who’s a small-time criminal who gets in way over her head.

Where did the idea come from?

I’d had the idea for quite a while. I actually built the whole setting – the lunar base – before I came up with the characters or story. One of the biggest challenges in sci-fi for me is lowering the stakes. People tend to expect planets to be cracking in half, but for me, the lower the stakes, the more realistic the setting. Metropolis in Superman doesn’t feel like a real city to me, because every Tuesday there’s a meteor coming to destroy it. With Artemis, I hope it feels like a real place. Whether the main character lives or dies, the city will go on.

Is it daunting trying to follow up a book as successful as The Martian?

Inevitably, Artemis is just going to get compared to The Martian. I’m looking forward to my third book when people will hopefully stop doing that!

No one would ever accuse The Martian of being literature. There’s no character depth, no one undergoes any sort of change, you don’t even really know much about Mark Watney, who you spend 350 pages with. You just know he really didn’t want to die. For