NYCC 2017: Rosario Dawson headlined panel and book launch for exciting Artemis
Fans of The Martian are eagerly anticipating Andy Weir’s follow up, Artemis, since it was announced, with a movie already in the works. Audible celebrated the upcoming audiobook launch with stars Rosario Dawson, LeVar Burton, and Neil deGrasse.
It’s no surprise that Andy Weir is releasing a follow-up, Artemis, after the huge success of The Martian — —both as a book and a Ridley Scott-directed mega sci-fi hit on the big screen. Artemis is also set in space, but will have a much more different approach, as the author describes, “a crime caper on the moon.” The book is highly anticipated. Not only that, it’s already been optioned for a movie, to be produced by 20th Century Fox. Artemis will center around a female space criminal, Jazz Bashara, who commits the perfect crime on Artemis, the singular moon city. Here’s the official description for the novel:
"Jazz Bashara is a criminal. Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she’s stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself-and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first."
The audiobook features Rosario Dawson (Daredevil) as the sole voice, who plays all the characters for the recording. Dawson talked about her fascination with Jazz at the New York Comic Con panel.
“It was really empowering to pretend to be this person,” she said.
With the enormous success of The Martian, fans have been eagerly anticipating Weir’s second novel. The author skyped into the NYCC panel from California and described the world he’s created in Artemis, a departure from Martian. His follow-up is full of space details, including the lack of weather on the moon, the efficiency of space travel in the future, and the changing boiling point of coffee. Weir went through several drafts, including going back to start all over again several times.
Weir also said that Artemis was “much more difficult to write” than The Martian.
“It’s pretty scary to follow up something like The Martian,” he said to The Verge at NYCC. You can read the rest of the interview here, where he talks about the vast difference between his two novels, and the many inaccuracies that make him cringe in the movie Gravity.
Worried that his second novel would disappoint fans after the incredible success of the first, he talked to his friend George R. R. Martin about his anxieties of perhaps being a “one-hit wonder” or feeling like an “imposter,” but said Martin told him, “that feeling never ends.”
Weir’s publisher is feeling pretty confident, though, with a lot of fanfare being spent on the upcoming project. Audible, which produced the audiobook, also kicked off the release with a celebration that featured Rosario Dawson, LeVar Burton (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Reading Rainbow), Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Cosmos, The Universe), and British artist Luke Jerram, displaying Jerram’s 23-foot lunar installation at the Car Club of America during New York Comic Con (it was gorgeous!). Dawson and Jerram “moonlit” up the lunar display to the delight of the crowd. The American actress also treated the audience to a sneak peek reading from the upcoming book.
The Museum of Artemis gallery was an exhibit for NYCC only that brought the world of Weir’s Artemis to life. Fused with excerpts from the upcoming novel, the museum included a space suit, the “coffin” sleeping quarters for Jazz and a scale that measured your weight according to the moon. But the show-stopper, of course, was the incredible moon art piece, a 1:500,000 scale replica. The lunar art piece included NASA surface imagery and the installation featured a surround-sound lunar-inspired musical accompaniment composed by Dan Jones. The artistic moon has been traveling the globe, but NYCC was the spot for its American debut. It gave the audience an opportunity to view NASA’s lunar imagery up close in a stunning setting.
If the Museum of Artemis: Life on the Moon is any indication, the upcoming book will be exciting and the movie is already in development. The feature film is a big priority for 20th Century Fox and two directors have been assigned to the project, Phil Lord and Chris Miller (The LEGO Movie, 22 Jump Street), who became available after leaving the Star Wars Han Solo spin-off. Weir will not be adapting the film himself, but the screenwriter will be someone Lord and Miller has worked with before. The film will be helmed by 20th Century Fox, New Regency, and Genre Films. Simon Kinberg and Aidtya Sood will produce. The Martian made $630 M worldwide, and expectations are high for Artemis.
Casting has not been announced for the film yet. Although Dawson performed the audiobook, there’s no guarantee she will be cast as Jazz. She even said at NYCC that she’s hoping they will cast someone who matches her ethnic makeup in the book—she is Saudi Arabian in the novel.
“What I love about this is how diverse the cast has the potential of being,” she said. “It would be really amazing to have and find a young Saudi Arabian actress to play this role and really cast people appropriately, which doesn’t happen very often.”
In the meantime, you can listen to an excerpt here.
And you can read an excerpt from the book here.
Artemis will be available November 14.