【Watch Friends】

Andy Weir is Watch Friendsback.

After the breakout success of the author's novel-turned-blockbuster-movie The Martian, Weir is returning to space with a new book Artemis.

SEE ALSO: MashReads Podcast: 'Chairman Spaceman' and our favorite books about space

The novel follows Jazz Bashara, space smuggler who has grown up on Artemis, the first city on the moon. When Jazz get's a heist job from one of Artemis' wealthiest citizens, she thinks she's hit the jackpot. However, what Jazz believes to be a tricky but solvable task soon transforms into a mission that not only threatens Jazz's future but also the future of Artemis itself.

"I hope you like Artemisbut Artemis is not The Martian," Weir explains. "It's a crime novel, it's a heist story. It's not a survival tale. It's not person versus nature. It's not The Martian. [Artemis] carries with it the things that are important to me and hopefully to the reader which are: scientific accuracy — I wanted everything to be as accurate as possible — and the snarky humor that I like to put in."

"My main thing is that I enjoy problem solving and I enjoy stories about problem solving," continued Weir while talking about what compels him as a writer. "You don't think of a survival tale and a heist story as being too similar, but the one thing they have in common is problems. You have a problem and you have to solve it, and the consequences for not solving it are dire."

This week on The MashReads Podcast, we talk with Andy Weir, author of The Martian, about his new novel Artemis. Join us as we chat about writing about space, figuring out how to live on the moon, and more.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Artemis

Andy Weir

Interview highlights

(Interview lightly edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview in the episode above.)

How did you come up with the story and plot of this book?

I designed the whole city — all the science and engineering and how it was built, and it’s economics — before I came up with any characters or plot.

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I was thinking about: I want a city on the moon. Well, how would you build that. OK, first question, WHY would you build that? People don’t found cities just for the hell of it, there hasn’t to be a reason, and it’s always economic.

When this started out, did know that you wanted this to be a book, or was this just you personally interested in space economics?

Well I, guess both. When I was working on this, I was like "Yeah, I want to write a book about this."

I actually am way more interested in economics than is this a good idea. Because most people aren’t. So if you write a book that’s super heavy on economics, you’re not going to have a lot of people liking it, so I had to be real careful. I tried to only talk about economics where it’s directly relevant to the plot. I actually wrote a paper on the economics of Artemis and how it works out.

One thing we learned from ThePhantom Menaceis: don’t start a story with a description of economics.

How did you come up with Jazz as a character?

That's funny because in the first plot idea that I had, was completely different than what I had now. I needed a shady, but not evil, smuggler/ criminal type. And I said, Artemis is this really international city — if you can get there, you can live there. So I thought, what's a country I haven't used yet. Uh, Saudi Arabia. And I'll make her female, just, 'cause. That was it. I invented Jazz in like four seconds while I was writing out an outline. But then went through more revisions, I was forced to come up with more backstory.

What was that like [coming up with this character]? She is so dissimilar to Mark Watney. She is so dissimilar to you.

Not as dissimilar as you might think.

Well, I assume you're not a Saudi Woman.

So she's physically dissimilar to me. But in terms of her personality, the reality is: Mark Watney is the idealized version of me. He's based on my personality but he has just the parts of my personality that I like, and he has none of my many flaws. So he's what I wish I could be come. He's everything that I like and magnified. Jazz is more like the real me: flawed, immature at times, she's very intelligent but she doesn't always do the intelligent thing. She makes mistakes and she has regrets. So she's more like me than you might suspect.

Yes, I am not an Arab woman. But I am a fairly intelligent person with regrets, bad decisions, immaturity issues. Main characters always have a bit of the author in them.

What was the most fun about writing this book?

Oh, the research. It's just me, sitting in front of my computer, happily googling away. It's so fun for me because it's problem solving. I'm like "All right, I want to build a city on the moon. Okay, what the hell do I build it out of? Well what's on the moon, well it turns out there's a whole bunch of aluminum on the moon. Okay, so what are the minerals that have aluminum and how do I get the aluminum out of it ... I worked out the whole process of how they built the city from scratch. None of that's in the book. The city is a fait accompli 20 years after its founding. But I worked it all out, and it was fun.

And as always, we close the show with recommendations:

• Andy recommends Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. "RPO just captured. It reached out and grabbed my right by the nostalgia and pulled me in." (And Andy Weir actually wrote a Ready Player Onefanfiction titled Lacero.)

• MJ recommends this "A Unifying Theory of Bops," a chart someone tweeted that rights pop music on a scale of whether it's a bop or not. "It's this weird chart with all of these great songs ranked." (You can also check out MJ's explainer on bops here.)

• Also mentioned on the show: Andy Weir's breakdown of the economics of building a city on the moon.

• And you can find Mashable's 2015 interview about putting science back in science fiction with The Martianhere.

Next week we're talking to Neil Patrick Harris (!!!) about his upcoming book The Magic Misfits. We hope you'll join us!

And if you're looking for even more book news, don't forget to follow MashReadson Facebook and Twitter. 

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