

And also, I wanted to ensure that a breach was incredibly unlikely.Īfter all, an entire city’s population will die if there’s a leak. That means aluminum, pretty much - it’s incredibly plentiful on the moon. I wanted to make sure the structures could be made from locally available materials. What research did you do when thinking about the habitats and architecture we need, to actually colonise the moon?

In Artemis, the population lives in bubbles named after astronauts- Aldrin, Conrad, and so on. I think I’ve done a good job, but in the end all I can do is my best, and hope people like it. What was the hardest part about writing a follow-up to The Martian? And yes, absolutely, I have a pretty detailed map of Artemis.

I worked out the foundations of the economics and why it works, why the city actually exists there, why everything is. It’s one of those things where I spent weeks and weeks carefully crafting all the details of the city, of which the reader will see about one per cent in the story.

How did you go about creating this fictional world on the moon? Walk us through your process: What kind of research was involved, do you have a map of Artemis, did you create a character storyboard?Ĭreating Artemis was actually a lot of fun. So, very different personalities and priorities. She is flawed in a lot of ways, but hopefully also likeable. She was a delinquent growing up, and now she realises that she made a lot of mistakes in her youth and she’s trying to make up for them. But, while Mark is a hard-working scientist trying to stay alive, Jazz is a sneaky criminal trying to get ahead. She’s another first-person-smart-ass narrator. Artemis is a crime story with mysteries involved-a plot that was harder to write but also more interesting, I think. They’re similar in that they both involve scientific solutions to complicated scientific problems, but The Martian was a straight-up human versus nature story, where the goal was simple survival. What are some of the similarities between The Martian and Artemis? And the differences? Also, unlike Mars, the moon could be a tourist destination, due to the comparatively short travel time to get there. While Mars has more raw materials, the moon is just so much closer, it’s considerably easier to colonise. And I think we will colonise the moon before we colonise Mars. Why the change in location?īecause this story is about colonisation, not exploration. In Artemis, you take readers to the moon.
