Andy Weir's New Book Is A Crime Thriller — Set On The Moon

The Martian was one of the biggest films of 2015, and now author Andy Weir's new novel Artemis looks likely to follow in its footsteps with a blockbuster movie of its own. Artemis sounds every bit as thrilling and hilarious as its popular predecessor: it's about a heist set on the moon. It's no surprise, then, that the film rights have already been pre-empted by 20th Century Fox.

The novel will publish on November 14, and in a video promoting its release, Andy Weir explains the long six-year gap since his debut novel was published. “The Martian was a straight up human verses nature story, where the goal was simple survival," he says. "Artemis is a much more complicated crime story with mysteries involved. It was a lot more difficult to write, but also much more interesting.”

The novel is set in a city called Artemis, the first and only city to be built on the moon, and living there isn't cheap. The protagonist, Jasmine "Jazz" Bashara, gets by as a smuggler — until she seizes an opportunity to pull off a much bigger crime. Before long, Jazz finds herself slap bang in the middle of a conspiracy to gain control of Artemis itself.

"Creating [the city of] Artemis was actually a lot of fun," Weir reveals in the video. "I spent weeks and weeks carefully crafting all the details of the city, of which the reader will see about 1 per cent in the story."

Two of the producers from the film adaptation of The Martian have already been attached to the adaptation of Weir's new novel — so I'm predicting the Artemis movie is going to be every bit as gripping as The Martian was.

There's no news yet on when this movie might hit the big screen, but we can definitely start counting down the days until the novel's November release. The book's U.K. publisher Gillian Green confirmed to The Bookseller that "Artemis has all the ingredients that we love about Andy's writing and that made The Martian such a global phenomenon — it's a story of human survival and it's full of drama, humour and cool science. This is a genre-busting SF novel that will again have broad appeal to non-genre fans, wrapped up in a fresh, high concept adventure and with a lead character who quite frankly I'd back in a fight with Mark Watney."

Well now that's given me an idea: can Andy Weir's next novel please be a crossover where Mark Watney and Jazz Bashara meet in space?