Mafia-style mining families clash in a compelling fantasy that offers up all the pleasures of a cut-throat soap opera in space
That old song “Everybody’s Going to the Moon” turned out to be a lie. Manned spaceflight in the 1960s and 1970s quickly slipped from science fiction’s dreamed-of future into reality’s irretrievable past. Going to the moon is now something our ancestors did, not something our children are likely to do. No human has ventured further than low earth orbit for 30 years.
Part of the problem is that when we went to the moon what we found was profoundly unpromising: a vacuum landscape of almost unimaginable harshness, lethally hot during its fortnight-long day, appallingly cold during its fortnight-long night, blasted with radiation, dusty, parched and grey. Ian McDonald thinks it will take a thumping profit motive to make lunar colonisation even remotely conceivable, and that colonists will have to be a more hardy breed than your regular frontiersmen and women. They’ll have to reconcile themselves to life in tunnels and domes, paying for every sip of water and breath of air, the threat of death continually at their back. That McDonald is able to spin a compelling story from this unforgiving set-up is testament to his skill as a writer.
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