Andy Weir builds a city on the Moon

When I arrived at the posh Sidwell Friends School in Bethesda, Maryland, to interview Andy Weir, he was tucked away in a rehearsal space, bent over a stack of copies of his latest novel, Artemis, and signing them for fans. As I entered the room, I overheard him tell a bookstore representative that he was suffering from a bad case of impostor syndrome. He told me the same thing 10 minutes later when he joined me for a conversation, sitting at one of the small classroom desks in the center of the room.

Weir knows that the success of his first novel, The Martian, was unusual. He also knows it is why fans are lining up to buy Artemis. (It is #9 on the 24 December New York Times fiction bestseller list.) “A writer will get a success like The Martian once in their life if they’re lucky,” he tells me. “I happened to get mine right out of the gate, so a lot of people are thinking, ‘Well, I assume that every one of his books is going to be that good.’ Well, you know, probably not.” Though Weir admits to being nervous about how Artemis will be received by his fans, he seems to have managed his own expectations. “When all the dust settles, if people say it’s not as good as The Martian but it’s still pretty good, I’ll call that a win.”

Much of what made The Martian a success is present in Weir’s new work. Artemis is narrated in a style that Weir describes as “first-person smartass.” That style allows him to weave in large amounts of exposition as his protagonist explains to the reader every technical detail, from the smallest circuit to orbital dynamics, of the world Weir has created in Artemis. It’s also a voice that comes easy to Weir. The Martian‘s Mark Watney and Artemis‘s Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara sound very much alike—and also like Weir when he gets on a roll.

Lunar city building

Weir lights up when I ask him to describe the lunar city of Artemis in which the book takes place. In a way, Artemis is the main character of the novel, and designing the city is where Weir’s creative process began.

The book started, he says, with the idea of a city on the Moon. Then he had to figure out how the city got there. “The main conceit in the story is that the price of low-Earth orbit has been driven down to the point that middle-class people can afford to go into space,” Weir says. “It’s expensive but still within reach. Once that happens, then you have a viable tourism economy.” Weir modeled Artemis after tourist towns on Earth, where the amenities enjoyed by visitors on holiday are often out of reach for those who live there permanently. While the wealthy tourists dine in fancy restaurants and stay in expensive hotel suites, most of the denizens of Artemis eat “gunk” (an algae-derived foodstuff) and shower in recycled gray water.

For Weir, the most obvious tourist destination is the Apollo 11 landing site, Tranquility Base. He put his city 40 km away from the landmark, for the sake of preservation. That puts Artemis within sight of the highlands, the older, lighter-colored region of the Moon. The highlands are made up of volcanic anorthosite, a rock that contains large amounts of anorthite—a mineral made of aluminum, silicon, calcium, and oxygen. Weir saw potential for his lunar city to use anorthite as a construction material. “You don’t need to mine, you don’t need to dig a tunnel; you literally just pick it up off the ground and that’s ore,” he says. “You take it back and process it, and you get aluminum to build your base and oxygen to fill it. It’s like the Moon is going out of its way to be as colonizable as possible.”

Before Weir could begin building and populating his city, he needed his characters to be able to process the anorthite. That, he discovered, would take an enormous amount of energy—a formidable challenge for a lunar city that would be affordable for middle-class tourists. “Let me put it this way,” Weir says. “To bring enough solar cells to be able to smelt anorthite, you may as well just ship the aluminum. So the city had to be nuclear powered.” Although most of this backstory is not in the book, Weir takes pride in the puzzles he solved to create a believable Artemis.

Tech first, characters second

The plot of the novel, which revolves around a heist attempt, is largely a vehicle for a fast-paced and suspenseful tour of Weir’s lunar city. Unfortunately Jazz, the plucky smuggler heroine of the novel, is never fully developed. We see snippets from her childhood in the form of letters to a Kenyan pen pal dispersed throughout the novel. That provides insight into who Jazz is, which is good because the main action of the book doesn’t give her much room for self-expression.

On the surface, Jazz is very different from Weir: She is an Arabic woman, born in Saudi Arabia to Muslim parents, who moved to the Moon as a child. I asked Weir about how he approached writing her character, and his answer reveals why, in the end, Jazz actually winds up being so much like him. “Mark is based on my own personality, but just the parts of my personality that I like,” Weir says. “Jazz is just a little bit more like the real me, especially as I was in my 20s. I was a screw-up, not remotely living up to my potential. I wanted to have a flawed protagonist, and so I thought the best place to draw those flaws from was my own history.”

Weir doesn’t deny that Jazz’s identity is incidental. “I designed the whole city of Artemis, all the science, all the tech, all that stuff, before I came up with any characters or story,” he says. “In the first draft of the story, I just had need of a likeable underworld smuggler connection for two or three scenes. I just kind of flipped through the globe and thought, what’s a country I haven’t used yet, because Artemis is a very international town. Saudi Arabia! So it’s going to be a Saudi person, and hey, let’s make it a woman. Why not? Done.”

Weir scrapped the first and second drafts of Artemis. In the process he became more attached to Jazz, and so he eventually made her the protagonist. By that time, Weir says, Jazz “was so cemented in my mind as a Saudi woman, my imagination would’ve rebelled if I tried to make her something I’m more familiar with.”

And yet, Weir found a way to avoid cultural or personal elements that were unfamiliar to him. “The fact that she is Saudi wasn’t difficult for me because while she was born in Saudi Arabia, she’s been in Artemis since she was six. So she’s really an Artemisian. That’s her culture, and that’s a culture I got to make up.” Weir shared drafts of the novel with the women in his life and asked for feedback. But in the end, he admits, “I’m just kind of guessing here. Orbital dynamics is easy. I don’t understand women.”

With more practice, and perhaps continued success, Weir’s ability to create the people who inhabit this world and the cultures that define it may come to match his world-building talents. The lunar city of Artemis may provide him with the setting in which to grow. When I asked him where he planned to go next in his novels, he told me that he hopes to write a series of books, each featuring different characters, that all take place in Artemis—akin to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series.

It is probably a safe bet that fans of The Martian who were drawn to the book for its attention to detail and its heroic presentation of technical problem-solving will find much to love in Artemis. Jazz may be underdeveloped, but she nonetheless provides an energetic and colorful perspective through which to experience an exciting heist. It’s easy to imagine a successful movie adaptation that could take her character further and do for Jazz Bashara what Matt Damon did for Mark Watney.

Matthew Shindell is a historian of science and a space history curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.