Instant Genius - Building a base on the Moon, and crafting believable sci-fi

Episode Date: December 8, 2017

If you love science fiction then you’re in for a treat. This month, we pick the brain of Andy Weir, author of the best-selling novel and film The Martian, about his new creation Artemis and how he crafts believable sci-fi worlds. In Artemis Weir has swapped Mars, NASA and the All-American hero Mark Watney for something a little more realistic: a privatised moonbase that’s home to small time smuggler Jazz Bashira. What the books do have in common is a love for the transformative science that will one day help humans live on distant worlds. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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If you love science fiction, then you're in for a treat. This month, I got to pick the brain of Andy Weir, author of of the best-selling novel and film The Martian. And I talked to him about his new creation, Artemis, the future of space exploration, and about how he crafts believable sci-fi world. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team.

With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. So in Artemis, Weir has swapped Mars, NASA and the all-American hero Mark Watney for something a little more realistic, a privatised moon base that's home to small-time smuggler, Jazz Bashira. And while the book covers different themes to the Martian, what both clearly have in common is a love for the science that will one day help humans live on distant worlds.

Here's we're talking about where the idea for Artemis came from. Well, I'd had the idea for the setting for quite a while, and I actually built up the whole setting before I came up with characters or story to happen in it. Yeah, it's a bit of a windy road. Basically, I came up with, I'm like, oh, okay, I want to have like a story. It takes place in a lunar city. I figured out all the details, how to scientifically accurate explanation of like why there's a lunar city, what the economics are, like how they built it, et cetera, et cetera. and I came up with all that first. Then I came up with a story to take place in it.

And I didn't like that story very much. Like it was completely unrelated to the Artemis you're reading now. Different characters, different story, different events taking place, different everything. Same old Artemis, though. And it wasn't very good. And also, Jazz was like a tertiary character. She was like I needed, like, I needed. like a scene with some, it's not like I wrote it, but I kind of mapped it out in my head.

I needed a scene that touched on the underworld and I needed a smuggler and stuff like that. And so I kind of created jazz in my mind as a tertiary character to be the smuggler. And then later on, I ditched that story idea because it wasn't that great. Then I said like, but I love the setting. So I came up with a new setting. Oh, and by the way, this is, this included my editor at random. house, Julian Pavia, and he and I were going back and forth, and I was like, well, here's my idea. And he's like, yeah, that's not very good.

And I mean, I'm like, hey, you're right. And so, and then so I came up with a different story idea, a completely different one. Again, different characters, different concepts, different, everything. But, you know, same old Artemis. Oh, yeah, and Julian had also said, like, oh, you know, the story has a lot of problems, but the setting is really cool, you know. So anyway, I came up with a different story. It takes place in Artemis, and this time Jazz was more prevalent.

She was not the main character, but she was like kind of a, you know, she was there, you know, much more, much more often in the story. And, you know, I showed that to Julian. And he's like, eh, still not very good. Better, but not very good. Still love the setting. Keep trying. And, you know, I agreed with them. And then so then I'm like, well, it seems like the best parts of these story ideas are the scenes or, or, uh,

plot lines that involve jazz. So why don't I just focus on jazz and tell a story about her? And kind of one of the biggest challenges in sci-fi for me is lowering the stakes. People tend to expect, well, if it's sci-fi, then planets have to be cracking in half, right? It's like, you know, and I'm like, see, to me, the lower the stakes, the more realistic the setting for me. You know, Metropolis doesn't feel like a real city to me because like every Tuesday there's a meteor coming to destroy it or something like that. You know what I mean? It doesn't feel real. It's like the city that's made out of tissue paper ready to just vanish.

But, you know, small stakes things taking place makes it seem more real. It's like, yeah, this is the city. It's like whether or not the main character lives or dies or whatever, the city will go on. Yeah, insurance claims are probably affordable compared to Metropolis. Yes. Metropolis is uninsurable. But anyway, so I realized that, I mean, I just liked Jazz, and I liked writing her. And all the feedback on that particular character was good.

So I came up with a story that revolved around her, and it became just, you know, a heist story set on the moon. And that really clicked. it's you know it works a lot better it's not you know no planets are cracking in half the future of mankind it's not at stake you know it's just like yeah does that make your characters more human and more easily because you can relate to what they're going through well I hope so um with jazz I was trying so first off no one you know talking about the elephant in the room hey I don't know if you know but I wrote The Martian. Was that film?

Yeah, no, it's a previous effort. It's kind of like, what is the Beatles? Oh, that was that band Paul McCartney was in before Wings. Yeah. Yeah, and so inevitably, Artemis is just going to constantly get compared to the Martian. So I'm looking forward to my third book when people kind of stop doing that. But, yeah, it's like in The Martian, no one would ever accuse it of being literature, right?

There is no character depth. There's no, like, there's nobody changes, like, that no one undergoes any sort of change in ideology or personality. You don't even really know much about Mark Watney, who you just spent, like, 350 pages with. You don't know much about his past, his anything. All you know is that he kind of really didn't want to die, right? So on this one, I still don't know what magic happened to make the Martians so popular. And I, you know, it's kind of like lightning in a bottle. But for Artemis, I really wanted to have more character depth.

I wanted to, I'm still a new author. I'm still learning the craft. And I wanted to have more character depth, more character interplay, more get kind of deeper, more complex motivations. stuff, whether or not I succeeded is up to the readers to tell me, but I gave it a world. And jazz is very flawed. She has lots of problems. She makes bad decisions. She does the wrong thing from time to time.

And that to me is really important because I don't empathize with characters who always do the right thing because I don't. Yeah, I think, you know, you sort of touched it. That's, you know, possibly part of the, I'm sure you spent many hours. trying to figure out the formula, but the formula of what made the Martian so successful possibly is partly down to Mark. You know, you had this incredible richness of science that was channeled through this very human approachable guy. You know, often scientists, I think, in films, they're often like almost superhuman. They're not as approachable.

They're usually used as an exposition source, not as a deep character. And the science, is like, okay, don't worry you're a pretty little head about it. Here's the result of the science. And, you know, I took a different approach on the Martian. But in Artemis, I'm much for, so one thing I like to say is that Mark Watney is the aspirational version of me. It's, he's all the parts of my personality that I like and none of the parts that I don't like. He doesn't have any of my flaws, my neuroses, my anxieties. He doesn't have any of that, right? He's got just the cool parts and magnified. Like, he's smarter than I am. He's. He's, He's wittier than I am.

He's, you know, all that stuff like that. Jazz is a little bit closer to the real me. And, I mean, I don't know if you do that. I don't know if any other people do this, but I come up with crime ideas all the time. When I'm sitting in it, when I'm standing in line of the bank, I'd be like, I bet you I could rob this bank. You know, it's like, I mean, I wouldn't. But I could rob this bank. So you touched it earlier and something I was particularly interested in.

And this was clear in the Martian and even early on it's clear in Artemis. You clearly sort of build these worlds first. Yeah. I just wondered what that process was like. You know, how do you do that? Oh, well, that's easy. And I can't speak for other writers, other fiction writers, but I think that's pretty prevalent among writers

is that world building is fun. Like, world building is the easy part. You spend all damn day doing world building. The hard part is making characters and stories that happen in the world. Right? I like to do the world building first because I like to,

I just really like setting up the rules first and then playing the game within them. You know what I mean? it's uh but but don't define every last little thing it's funny you mention that because like just literally last night i was on a panel uh with uh four other writers and we were just talking about world building that was the whole yeah um the trick with world building is that you do it to the point that you're ready to write a story and then you stop because if you define the living crap out of everything then you'll feel constrained when you're writing the story because certain things end up

being sacred cows that you're not willing to get rid of of. And then it holds up the story. But for Artemis, I started off with really simply, I'm like, I need an economic reason for there to be a city on the moon. Because that's one of my biggest problems when I'm reading sci-fi. And there's like, oh, here's a city on the moon or here's the city on Mars or whatever. And there's like, you know, 10,000 people live there. And I'm like, why? Cities don't happen without an economic reason. I mean, every city on Earth, there's a reason that it's there. You may not know the reason, and it may be subtle, but there's some economic reason for it to be there. And Artemis, it's like people won't just move to the moon for no

reason. And so my explanation was the price to low Earth orbit is driven down by competition in the booster market, right, in the, you know, like by companies like SpaceX and some future equivalents of SpaceX, like the Kenya Space Corporation. And they drove the price to low Earth orbit down low enough that middle class people can afford to go to space, like as a vacation. And once you can get out of Earth's gravity, then actually going to the moon doesn't cost that much more. It's actually getting from the ground to Lower Earth orbit takes a lot more fuel than

getting from Lower Earth orbit to the moon. So I figured, oh, well, once you reach that point, a lunar city would develop just naturally because of the tourism potential. It's like, you know, if you could, I mean, people would put a second mortgage on their house to spend a couple of weeks on the moon, you know? Yeah, yeah. And so that is the economic foundation of Artemis. And I'm like, okay, given that, now work forward. Like what is now, so how do they build it?

Why do they, you know, okay, so it's a tourist destination. So I went online and said like, oh, let's look at some tourist spots in the Caribbean and stuff, like places where. humans would not live were it not for the tourist industry there. And I'm like, okay, so what percentage of people there are tourists and what percentage are people who live there and make their living off of catering to the tourists? And that was the foundation of Artemis. And then it was fun with all the science of saying like, okay, how do you build a city on the moon? You're not going to want to ship up a hundred million tons of aluminum, right? You're going to, you know, it's like, how do you build it? Well, you make metal out of the material.

is it notebooks that you're you're writing all these days down on is it on your computer do you have one of those crazy walls with string and i want one of those walls a little bit i know i kind of one of those walls too but i've found that you know Microsoft word does that jump fairly well and i just have a i have a document creatively named notes dot doc that has all this crap in it how big is that document uh it's fairly it's not that big it's actually only about seven or eight pages what i do is I take down the salient notes and then there's just links, you know, URLs that I pasted in there of like, oh, here's a complete, you know, here's a complete article detailing every part of the FFC Cambridge process for smelting anorthyte into aluminum. And I'm like, you know,

if I need to remember details of that, I go look up, you know, I go back and look, look at the article. Oh, and spreadsheets, by the way. Oh, tons and tons of sheets. Oh, yeah. Just what, linking everything together. No, no, no, like for doing math. Oh, of course, right. Oh, calculating. Yeah, there you're going to. It would make things easier.

Yeah. And you mentioned it earlier. You mentioned who's winning the space race at this point. Yes, Kenya in the story. Basically, what happened, and this is known to everyone in the setting, is that as booster companies were competing to, you know, make change. cheaper and cheaper boosters that go into lower Earth orbit. The Minister of Economics of Kenya, a woman named Fidelis and Gugi,

she realized we have a chance to build a space industry in Kenya and pull ourselves out of the third world, right? And she said, what we can do, we have two things that we can offer the space industry. One, we're on the equator because the equator, it's cheaper to launch from the equator than from anywhere. else because Earth's rotation is fastest at the equator. And so you get about 500 meters per second for free just because of the rotation of Earth. And that's, uh, that is not trivial. That's like, you need about 7,800 meters per second. So you're talking about a one part in 16 or so of just getting that velocity for free, right? Right. And that, that in turn means less, less money spent on fuel less fuel less money also you can uh yeah um also you can uh launch out since you always want

to take advantage of the earth's rotation you launch eastward which is why our in the u.s our launch complexes in on notice it's in florida on the eastern coast of florida because that's as far south as we can get in the u.s that's as close as we can get to the equator and on the eastern side so that we can launch out over the ocean and the reason you launch out over the ocean is because if the launch fails, you don't kill a bunch of people when the rocket falls to the ground, right? Anyway, so Kenya has that to offer. And then also, she said, and the best thing we can do is we can offer policy.

The other countries in the world, the U.S. and Russia and the, you know, ESA and so on, they are mired with rules and regulations and stuff like that. Actually, right, and I do believe this, that one of the biggest impediments to commercial space flight right now is policy. It's not science. It's policy that's in the way. And Kenya said, like, okay, we have the equator. We can be cheaper. And we're going to offer policy. We're basically going to make a bunch of laws that makes it so that the government, like, not only gets out of the way of, but actively encourages with tax breaks and all sorts of stuff, you know, the space industry. And so they didn't, it's not like a company started in Kenya and happened to be the one that did well.

It's like the government of Kenya dumped a lot of time, energy and resources into it. And they helped create the Kenya Space Corporation by getting a bunch of corporations. It's really a global corporation. They got a bunch of companies from all over the world to invest huge amounts of money into building the Kenya Space Corporation. Do you think that's almost not necessarily that this will be Kenya, but that's almost certainly how we will progress further into space now. Because I think in The Martian, it's very much a NASA, JPL story. And then this is very much a more commercialized future of space in Artemis.

Is that the way you see things going? Yeah, I do. You know, Artemis is what I think is a more realistic. vision of the future of manned spaceflight. I think the Martian was, I shamelessly evoked the feelings of the Apollo era just to make the reader feel that, you know, but it's not necessarily realistic. So obviously, Marshall was a massive hit. Has your research process been the same? I did read about when you were looking at the Martian. Your research was, you know, just you, a computer and your imagination?

What did you want to find out about now? Was it the same for Artemis, or did this kind of new world of success bring you other avenues to look at? No, same, pretty much the same thing, just me, my computer and, you know, Google. I just, yeah, I like doing the research on my own. I mean, there are lots of people I know now, thanks to the Martian. I know scientists and astronauts and stuff like that. But for the most part, it's easier for me to just look stuff up online than to email the experts.

So you build this massive world. How much of it gets left on the like the editing floor? Oh, like, you know, 98%. Like it's like all the details of how Artemis was built. I worked it out like all the way from like, you know, the first landing. And there's all sorts of interesting stuff in there. but it's not germane to the story, so it doesn't go in. You know, it's just like if I was going to write a story,

imagine if we lived in some other dimension or something like that, and I was going to write, and I was going to write like, you know, diehard, you know, the story for diehard the movie, right? And but for whatever reason, like, imagine if the United States and Los Angeles and everything, imagine if that was all fictional, right? Okay, well, there's a lot of interesting stuff that led up to the existence of Los Angeles, right? The city, the history of the city, how it came to be, how it used to be owned by the Spaniards, and then, you know, and then, and then how the United States came to be and all that

stuff like that, and then how it became part of the United States. And then, you know, how a Japanese company, which is another country, by the way, another fictional country came in and built the Nakatomi Plaza and so on. And it's like there, there would be an enormous amount of backstory there, but you don't stop and tell that. For both books, there are moments where, and I think that's part of the appeal of them, where you sort of stop and talk the reader through your, you know, the character or, you know, why something is happening. Earlier on, there's a great example with tea.

Is it something you find particularly interesting or the tiny little details like that with the tea and the coffee or just are what I think really sell a setting. It's like when you hit someone with something they never thought of, but then seems obvious in retrospect, that's when they're like, oh, yeah, it's these tiny little details of like living on the moon. You know, like, yeah, the boiling point of water is like 61 degrees Celsius or something because of the low atmospheric pressure. And it's like, well, your tea's not going to taste very good.

Now, yeah, because we, as an English person, I did wonder about this. Oh, this must have heard you deep on some spiritual level. Well, I did wonder what would happen. I was sort of tempted to try and see what would happen if I tried to brew tea at 61 degrees to see whether that would be hot enough to actually... I mean, it would make an approximation of tea, I think, but... Pretty weak.

Yeah, for the most part, you boil the water, right? Yeah. But I get actually like a lot of feedback on that one part, which is funny. A lot of people zeroed in on that. It's like, oh, man, wait. And I've had, you know, people email me and say like, well, you could make it a pressure cooker, right? You could, if you made it in a pressure cooker, the pressure, you could increase the pressure inside the cooker to the point that the boiling point is higher, right?

And then you could make proper tea. Now, it would cool off. You know, it would have to cool off once you got it into Artemis's pressure, but at least it would have steeped properly. I'm glad you thought about this. Yeah, it's a whole thing. And is that something you get a thrill out of that kind of stuff? Yes, I really do. Yeah, one of the things I didn't calculate it, I found a paper on it for Artemis is a cycler orbit.

called the Uphoff Crouch Cycler, Lunar Cycler. And what it is is it is an orbit that you can put something in, like in this case, it's basically a space hotel that's in this orbit. And it will just with no additional fuel necessary, it will just regularly come near Earth and regularly come near the moon at predictable intervals. And so basically you go, when it's near Earth, you go to it and then you live there for, a week or so until it gets to the moon and then you go to the moon. And so it's this really cool thing. Velocity is kind of almost as important as position in when you're talking about space. So you end up spending as much fuel to get to the moon as you would have anyway because you have to catch up to the cycler, which is hauling ass. But what it means is you don't need to

accelerate this huge heavy human habitat every time. You just take the people to it. Yeah. So if you imagine, imagine there is this big heavy cruise ship going back and forth between New York and London, right? And for whatever reason, it requires no fuel. It just magically does it. Now, you still have to like put the passengers. Oh, but one thing is it doesn't stop. Right. It just kind of bounces back and forth. And so, well, that means you have to put passengers on a dingy or something like that and go catch up to the boat and load them on. But that's a lot easier than sending a whole boat from zero to, you know. Was that an idea you kind of had and then you went to look for the papers that could. I mean, I knew that cyclers existed.

And I knew there was a Mars cyclor orbit as well. But I was like, there's got to be a lunar cycler, right? and I went and looked and researched online and I found the up-hulf the up-off crouch cycler and I was like, oh, hey. It's an interesting time in space exploration because we've got the kind of

SpaceX and the commercial guys making really good progress at the stuff that we need to figure out. And at the same time that kind of national space exploration has kind of been largely probes and robots and things like that. So do you think

we are going to still put people on planets, on moons. Are we due a return to that? Yes, we are, but mainly because it's a huge PR coup to do, right? So China would like to send humans to the moon, and that would be a big thing for them. They'd really kind of establish themselves as a real space power by doing that. There's really no economic benefit to doing it. The Apollo missions, I mean, we didn't do that for, I mean, we did that because we were in the space race with the Soviets, right? So, but also in terms of science and scientific analysis, it's actually much better to put, to use robots.

Yeah. I mean, because, you know, nobody really gets upset if your robot dies. Yeah, it's not such a big PR. Yeah, and you don't need to bring the robot back. And the robot doesn't need to breathe on, you know, and so on. The Apollo missions took place doing a very tiny kind of overlap of era where we had the ability to send humans to the moon, but we didn't have the ability to make a really good remote-controlled robot to do the exploration for us. And like we didn't have the micro-processing and stuff like that, which is really interesting. It's like, it's like this was, you know, the Apollo era took place.

When we were sending people to the moon, there was like people in mission control were all smoking cigarettes. Yeah. You know, it's like, it's this weird overlap or like that. I love that scene in Apollo 13 where they're double checking the math of Commander Lovell. And it's like all these guys in mission control whipping out their slide rules because they didn't have pocket calculators. Do you feel like we need to? Because some, you know, some people would argue we only need to set robots out there. Do you feel like we should be putting humans out there in space?

I think that that's not the right way to look at it, in my opinion. A better way to look at it is this, is like once you make it economically viable for people to go into space, they'll do it on their own. You don't have to push that agenda. Humans do tend to just kind of expand out wherever they were. And I do believe that once the price to lower Earth orbit gets driven down far enough, there will be a commercial spaceflight industry because people will want to go just because it's cool. And companies like SpaceX are starting to bring that about. What would be awesome, the best thing that could possibly happen is if some other company developed to really be a competitor to SpaceX. Because as it is, SpaceX is blowing away all these old established booster companies because you've got things like, you know, ULA or Aristide or whatever, you name it.

They are not efficient. They're not money efficient. They never needed to be. They were always government contracts. So why bother putting time and effort and resources into figuring out how to cheap at them? Now, SpaceX is doing that and they're like just a fraction of what it costs, you know, these other guys cost. Now, there are a couple other people trying to get into the space, like Boeing and Blue Origin, which is Jeff Bezos's space-related company. And that's all cool.

But what would be nice is if there was some Elon Musk equivalent in, like, Japan, you know, who was like, who started his own extremely efficient and competitive booster industry. because I honestly think that like the advances of the last like 50 years of aircraft, of commercial aircraft, is largely due to the competition between Boeing and Airbus. Like basically we have that particular rivalry to thank for huge advances in aircraft technology. If someone slapped a ticket on your desk to do a, you know, a space flight, a proper one, would you take it? Nope. No brainer.

No, absolutely not. I write about brave people and I'm not one of them. I would not go into space or to Mars or to the moon or anything like that. I mean, if you set up a situation where it's like, okay, it is now the future and space travel is as safe as commercial air travel, then I might consider it. But that's... Yeah, if it was a safe and a smooth. although it's commercial air travel isn't that smooth really. Right. Yeah. I don't know.

Well, so if it gets to be the way things are in Artemis, then maybe I would because first off it's very safe. Second off, oh yeah, another thing I did was I worked out all the details of how you get to and from, you know, Artemis. One thing is, I may touch on this in a future book, but the idea is like, it's a plane you can just sit in your seat and you know the plane takes off there's a little bit of thrust at the beginning and a little bit at the end but it's not like really violent or painful you know unless it's unless there's heavy turbulence right um but for a rocket that's like you're pulling you know three gs on the ascent you can't you have to be in the right position you have to be an acceleration couch and so so I decided rather than try to train every every potential passenger you know uh on all this stuff Instead, what they'll do is I said, like, well, Artemis takes place about 70 years in the future-ish. And so I said, okay, well, they have, in that 70 years, they've invented much safer general anesthetic.

Like, it's just a really, really safe general anesthetic. And so if you go into space, you don't just, like, get into an acceleration couch and stuff like that. No, they put you in basically like a pod and they knock you out. and then you wake up aboard the space hotel. That way they don't have to deal with like that that way they don't. I mean, it's horrifying to go into space. You need to be super brave. What I imagine is like the Ascentcraft would have like a pilot or two and a doctor.

And then a bunch of unconscious passengers. And then they they fly up. They dock with the with the cycler. And then like just kind of unload everybody into their. state to their rooms, you know. And then the other thing I imagined was like, oh, and in addition to the pods, the cyclers themselves would have centripetal gravity. In other words, they just rotate to provide.

Right. That was going to be my question, actually. Yeah. Yeah, how would they deal with the gravity? Because they spin. And then, so just imagine one of those ring kind of like hotels. And I was even thinking like, ooh, the cycler could be really clever. It's like when you get aboard the cycler, when you wake up aboard the cycler, it's spinning such that you have 1G of gravity, right?

And then over the next seven days, which is the time it takes for it to get to the moon, they could just very slowly reduce the rotation rate. And then by the time you get to the moon, you're at 1.6g. So you transition very slowly over the course of a week to 1 6th gravity and so that you have kind of gotten used to it by the time you're on the moon. Andy Weir, author of The Martian there. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast. In our Christmas issue, which is on sale now, we speak to the scientists who grow brains without a body. We report on how mathematicians are taking on terrorism.

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