On a sci-fi odyssey
> Andy Weir turns his gaze from Mars in his first bestselling novel, The Martian, to the Moon for his second book, Artemis
Artemis, theSun Artemis Jasmine ‘Jazz’ Bashara, who makes enough from selling smuggled contraband to eventually move to the more luxurious part of the city.
Her regular customer, the wealthy Trond Landvik, offers Jazz a huge sum to sabotage equipment belonging to Sanchez Aluminium, a company that extracts aluminium from the anorthite rocks.
However, her failure to carry out the mission successfully leads to Trond and his bodyguard being murdered and an assassin hot on Jazz’s trail.
Like The Martian, Weir goes into great detail about the conditions of the place and what humans have to do to
survive in inhospitable worlds.
He also engages the reader with the scientific possibilities of living on the Moon, such as Trond’s paralysed daughter walking with crutches, and Moon-grown advanced fibre optics technology.
“I like the little details,” said Weir. “I imagine myself in that world and it is the little things that make it feel real to the reader.
“I love science and I have always been interested in that.
“A large part of writing these books is doing the scientific research. Personally, it is for my own enjoyment.”
Weir estimates that he spends half the time he takes to come up with his books on research.
It took him three years to write The Martian (on nights and weekends while holding a full-time job), starting in 2009 and finishing in 2012.
The success of his first book has given him the luxury to concentrate fully on Artemis (which he began in 2016 and completed early last year). Weir also says he already had the whole city of Artemis in his mind before he even came up with
the story.
“I then created a bunch of characters and plot, but it is nothing like what ended up in the book.”
He had in mind a likeable rogue character who would appear in only two or three scenes, and settled for a smuggler from Saudi Arabia, a country he had not written about yet. “I then thought, why not make [the character] a woman, and boom! [However], she did not have any depth or definition because she was a very minor character.”
Weir scrapped the initial plot and made Jazz a more central but still secondary character. But that did not go anywhere either.
“But I liked the character of Jazz,” Weir says, “and I thought why not write about her.”
Weir uses a series of correspondence Jazz has with her Earth pen-pal, Kelvin, to tell her back story, which allows readers to know more about her early life and what motivates her.
He explains: “I didn’t want to spend a lot of time talking about Jazz’s past, and this way, I could give the most important parts of her life without a bunch of surrounding material.”
Weir admits that he based Jazz on how he was at her age (26).
“I did not live up to my potential, I made many bad life decisions. I did not commit any crime but I was in her psychological space, very immature for my age, that kind of thing.”