Booklog 4/2023: Ian McDonald: Luna – New Moon – Luna #1

The moon has no law except contract law. Think Game of Thrones meets the Expanse, set on the moon where there are hundreds of ways to die or be killed, and every breath. every sip of water must be paid for. Those with more money live lower down away from the surface radiation. The poorer ones live closer to the surface, selling their piss for the elements it contains. After two years on the Moon there’s no option to return to Earth – loss of bone density and Earth’s gravity would be fatal. It’s a brutal world with five main family consortiums, known as dragons, rivalling each other for mining resources to sell back to under-resourced Earth. The Corta family (think Starks without the sympathy vote) are locked in commercial battle with the McKenzies (Lannisters with a huge commercial empire). There are also Vorontsovs, Asamoahs and Suns who are not front and centre in this book but whose interlaced presence is significant. There aren’t really any sympathetic characters to root for, though some are slightly more sympathetic than others. Marina Calzaghe is new to the Moon - a Joe Moonbeam. The Corta matriarch, Adriana, worked her way up from humble beginnings to found a dynasty. Her children and grandchildren work together, but there are family rivalries as she ages. Expect grim, gritty reality with believable science and engineering, a fair amount of explicit sex, assassinations, enormous extractors separating rare earth metals from lunar regolith, dynastic marriages, deadly rivalry, and the Moon itself, always ready to kill with hard vacuum, radiation or too much dust. The hard-science worldfbuilding is rich and detailed. The pace picks up at the end, so expect a breathless finish and lots of dangling plot to lead on to the next book. There are a lot of characters and you feel as though there will be an exam at the end to make sure you’ve kept track of them all. There are a lot of words I didn’t understand – derived from Portuguese, Korean, Arabic, Ashanti, Chinese, and Yoruba amongst other languages, and then – right at the end – a glossary where it does no good at all when you’re reading on kindle. At least have the grace to put it at the beginning, so the reader KNOWS it’s there and can refer if necessary. That did piss me off a bit when I’d struggled through the book trying to intuit the words in context. Am I going to read on? Not right away. I need something lighter next, but I might come back to it. I understand there’s a TV series in the offing which should be good.