: And you calculated exactly how much it would cost, given those conditions, to transport objects and people to the moon, and therefore developed what the society there would be like.Īndy Weir, author of "Artemis" and "The Martian." (Image credit: Crown Publishers) If middle class people can afford to go to the moon, even if they had to get a second mortgage to afford it, I think a lot of people would. For a lunar city, the thing I came up with was tourism. I'm like, wait a minute, why does this city exist? Why would people live there? Why wouldn't they go somewhere else? Stuff like that. For me, one thing is when I'm reading a book I get hung up on the economy of fictional environments.
And Artemis' economy is based on tourism. If we could just get there.Īnd so, the conceit of the story is that the commercial space industry has driven the price of low-Earth orbit down to the point that middle class people can afford to go to space. It's like it's just there, just waiting for us. Silicon and oxygen makes glass, and - yeah. And by the way, if you want glass or windows, it also gives you silicon, and there's a bunch of oxygen still. That gives you aluminum to make your moon city out of and oxygen to fill it. The lunar highlands are the bumpy bits - 85 percent of the rocks just lying around on the ground are anorthite, which is a mineral, and you can smelt that into aluminum, oxygen, silicon and calcium. In the lunar highlands, which is the part of the moon that is not smooth - if you look at the moon, you see the smooth parts and the bumpy bits. It's really cool, actually - the moon is basically made of moon bases, with some assembly required.
I really like that type of character, and so I had fun writing her.Ī smelter lets the denizens of the moon base Artemis smelt raw materials on the moon into aluminum, oxygen, silicon and calcium. She's kind of the lovable rogue archetype. Weir: In every version and as it went forward, she was the one who got all the funny lines. : What drew you to writing about Jazz in particular? And I didn't like the plot that had developed, and in the next revision of story, Jazz was much more prominent, but still not the main character, and then I realized, well, the fun part here is Jazz anyway, so why not write a story about her? So that's how I landed on the current plot. I just needed a comedy smuggler type, and so I invented her for that. But in the first revision, Jazz - who is the main character in "Artemis" - Jazz was a very minor, tertiary character. I may steal elements of them someday, so I'm not really telling people what they are. The first two revisions just weren't very good. "Artemis," as it is right now, was kind of my third attempt at a story, and that's the one that stuck.
: What kinds of stories did you try to set in that city before you finally settled on one?
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