Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald

Bugg

A Lerxst in Wonderland
Joined
Aug 7, 2011
Messages
1,822
Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald



2015 - Gollancz ebook - 393 pages


The Moon wants to kill you.

Maybe it will kill you when the per diem for your allotted food, water, and air runs out, just before you hit paydirt. Maybe it will kill you when you are trapped between the reigning corporations - the Five Dragons - in a foolish gamble against a futuristic feudal society. On the Moon, you must fight for every inch you want to gain. And that is just what Adriana Corta did.

As the leader of the Moon's newest "dragon," Adriana has wrested control of the Moon's Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, in the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation - Corta Helio - confronted by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies... and each other.



This is the story of the Cortas, one of the five families - or 'Dragons' - whose corporations rule the Moon. Set some fifty years after first colonisation, the Moon is now home to one and a half million people. In one way or another they are all beholden to one of the five families: the Brazilian Cortas, the Australian McKenzies, the Russian Vorontsovs, the Ghanaian Asamoahs, and the Japanese Suns. These families form allegiances through marriage and business, or scrape sparks off each other and fight clandestine corporate wars over territory and broken contracts. The last real war between any of them happened eight years before the book starts.

That start is suitably and literally breathtaking: Lucasinho Corta, grandson of Adriana (the matriarch of the family) takes part in a Luna Run, a few seconds of life or death scramble across bare yards of Lunar surface from airlock to airlock without suit or oxygen. In the wake of this, a party, and an assassination attempt on his uncle, Raphael Corta, big boss of Corta Helio, and the story is off and running.

I've seen several reviews refer to this book as 'Game of Thrones in space'. I'm glad Gollancz have, thus far at least, not chosen to market the book in that vein. That sort of lazy comparison irritates me. On this occasion, though, especially if the upwardly mobile Cortas somehow resemble Martin's Starks, and the all-powerful McKenzies have a whiff of Lannister, it's a comparison that is kind of valid. McDonald is neither less frightened to take chances with his characters nor to dispatch them when the story requires it. 'Humans are not made for endless light,' one character says, 'Humans need their darknesses'. He is equally as brutal as Martin ever was and, freed from the constraints of a hackneyed fantasy setting, I found his writing style - concise, to the point - really took flight. It took me a few pages to get used to it but once in I was there for the duration, swept along by his characters, the dialogue, the imagery, the edge-of-seat action sequences, the occasional skips back in time as Adriana tells her story.

Four hundred pages of plotting, conniving, backstabbing, alliances, feuds, sex, marriages, relationships, divorces and bitter, bitter enmity later and the book threw me out emotionally drained and gasping for more. It's a book full of ideas, but those ideas are just a backdrop for the characters' lives, loves, hates and desires. All of the Cortas are fantastic characters - not particularly likeable, but fantastic nonetheless. Take them, add Marina Calzaghe - new to the Moon, struggling to make ends meet, whose crucial intervention finds her on a startling upward curve - throw in the various McKenzies (who you may or may not want to punch), plus a whole host of lesser characters - it's a lot to get your head around at first, but it works.

On the negative side, one or two of the ideas didn't quite work for me (particularly with regard to the use of air as a commodity that could be denied to an individual, which seemed fine if they were wearing space suits but when a character is in the same room as others and breathing the same air, but somehow denied that air . . . I must've missed some explanation as to how that worked). Also, in the early goings, frequent references to the glossary at the back of the book were required. Fortunately this is incredibly easy on the Kindle. It's not helped by the fact that there are a lot of spelling errors in the Kindle version. These weren't deal-breakers, for me, as they tended not to break the flow of my reading because the word was obvious. Still, it shouldn't really happen to this degree.

Luna: New Moon is the first book in a duology. CBS have already snapped it up for a tv adaptation. I would rather a cable channel had it. I'm afraid a network may water it down too much. As the story effortlessly moves through the gears towards its breathless and breathtaking final chapter it left me with no doubts that part two can't come soon enough.
 
That sounds really interesting @Bugg . I've not read any of Ian McDonald's work yet but have Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone flagged on my wish list. Have you read any more McDonald's work and could you suggest whether this would be better than Scissors as a first read of his?
 
I'm afraid I haven't, no - this was my first of his books. I picked it up for £1.99 when there was a Gollancz promotion across their range to coincide with the festival they put on at Waterstone's in London and Manchester last week (http://www.gollancz.co.uk/gollancz-festival-waterstones-piccadilly-event/). I enjoyed it (the book - I didn't go to the festival) so much that it got me to post my first review on here, though, and it's definitely got me wanting to read more of his work :)
 
I know that feeling :D Not helped by sales like the Lost Fleet one and the Gollancz one last weekend - I may have picked up a few other books for £1.99 each, too :ninja:
 
The cover for the sequel, Luna: Wolf Moon (due in September this year), has been revealed:

LUNA-WOLF-MOON.jpg




Sorry for the size of the image :whistle: I didn't want to link to the Gollancz page as the blurb gives away the ending of the first book :rolleyes:
 
I've now read and enjoyed this despite some grumbles. Here are my thoughts:


This is one of the best stories I’ve read for quite some time; I’ve seen it compared to Game of Thrones but I’ve neither read the books nor seen the TV series so I can’t really comment on that comparison, and besides I feel it is an inappropriate comparison given that one is pure fantasy and the other pure science fiction and moderately hard science fiction at that. New Moon is very much about dynastic battling and based on my limited knowledge of Game of Thrones that’s about as far as the similarity goes. A better comparison, in my opinion, would be Dune; dynastic struggles, high tech but justifiable low tech weaponry, set in a deadly ecosystem – the lunar vacuum or Dune’s deserts. No worms though! My only complaint here is that it is a series that is not yet all written; with such a large complex cast it’s going to be a real problem reading these at one to two year intervals. I know the second one is out already but that will make the wait for the next one almost worse!

I’ve only read one previous book by McDonald – Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone – which was okay but not a patch on this. All the main characters (and there are quite a few) have their own distinct voices and, where appropriate, are very sympathetic even with their various failings or, again where appropriate, utterly unsympathetic; ruthless, callous and even obscene; there are some definite echoes of Vladimir Harkonnen. This strong, dynastic cast act out their ambitions and battles on the relatively newly colonised moon; a ‘world’ dominated by corporate interests; there is no real law except contract law; murder someone and you might start a feud and/or be required to pay compensation to their family but you’ll probably not suffer any further punishment. And in this environment the five great lunar families manoeuvre for power with assassinations, alliances, marriages and battles all playing their part.

Notice that at the beginning I said ‘one of the best stories’ not ‘one of the best books.’ Sadly, whilst the story was indeed excellent, its implementation was rather less so. The books was filled with typos and numerous other irritating quirks. Yes, I know, I do have a tendency to be picky about this aspect of the publishing industry but, whilst typos on almost every page is just intensely annoying when reading a self-published book, it is, in my opinion, completely unacceptable for a well-established author, Ian McDonald, being published by one of the big traditional publishers, Tor. They’re silly little mistakes like ‘Wagner said with tilt of his head’ or ‘I found out what how the friendship of women differs from the friendship of men’ or ‘The Mackenzies won’t daren’t touch us.’ These are all mistakes that should have easily been picked up by even the most basic of proof reads. How can publishers like Tor justify their take if they can’t even get something like that right?

But it wasn’t just the typos that annoyed. What is it with McDonald’s seeming obsession with fashion? At the start of almost every new scene we get regaled with detailed descriptions of clothing and accessories right down to fashion labels – Suzy Perette dresses, Fendi bags and so on – we are constantly bombarded by designer labels being worn by the characters throughout the book. A little of that sort of thing can make a point but here it is pedantically continuous throughout the entire book. Then there were languages issues; the dynasty that the book stays closest to is of Portuguese descent but there are also many other language influences and words from these languages are often used for job titles and such like so, not unreasonably (though for me annoyingly), a glossary is provided at the end of the book, but having to refer to this glossary for words only to find they just mean brother, sister, aunt, uncle etc. is just plain annoying. The book is written in English and, whilst it’s fine to give atmosphere by using other languages for some significant things, using them in this way contributes nothing. An associated annoyance is that a map of the moon is provided complete with Latin names for places such as Mare Tranquilitatis and then in the text sometimes that Latin name is used whilst at other times the English, Sea of Tranquillity, is used instead there is no consistency. Also having provided the map most of the locations named in the text do not appear.

My final complaint was the ending, a total cliff-hanger that felt more like the end of an episode than the end of a book it simply stopped pretty much in the middle of an action sequence. The last we see of one pair of major players is them escaping their pursuers by climbing a ladder, we leave them mid climb and that’s it. There was no real resolution, just an abrupt ending midway through a big climatic finale. I hate books in series that end like this; it’s just cheap and lazy.

So it’s an excellent story but with scrappy implementation. Five stars for the story barely three for the production. I am however very much looking forward to the next instalment.

4/5 stars
 
Last edited:
My only complaint here is that it is a series that is not yet all written; with such a large complex cast it’s going to be a real problem reading these at one to two year intervals. I know the second one is out already but that will make the wait for the next one almost worse!

I'm quite disappointed about this. It was originally meant to be a duology, and I bought into it on that basis (and accepted the cliffhanger on that basis, too, if it was essentially the first half of one long book). But, apparently (I haven't read it), the second book comes nowhere near finishing the story. So the GoT comparison becomes even more apt - wasn't that planned to be a trilogy??

In any case, I'll wait and see if a third book is confirmed before I even think of reading Wolf Moon. At least then I'll only have to re-read the first one.
 
I'm quite disappointed about this. It was originally meant to be a duology, and I bought into it on that basis (and accepted the cliffhanger on that basis, too, if it was essentially the first half of one long book). But, apparently (I haven't read it), the second book comes nowhere near finishing the story. So the GoT comparison becomes even more apt - wasn't that planned to be a trilogy??

In any case, I'll wait and see if a third book is confirmed before I even think of reading Wolf Moon. At least then I'll only have to re-read the first one.

It has now expanded into a trilogy. I would say the second book has a more conclusive ending than the ending of the first book, although the set-up is clearly there for the third book (which is supposedly targeted for 2018, although I tend not to believe book release dates).

I thought the second book was a good continuation of the story, I think I probably prefer it slightly to the first book.
 
Thanks for the confirmation! I'll wait till the final book's out then read them all.
 
Well, by my count, I'm now currently reading no less than 13 different book series, so, as I also read a lot of stand alone books, it does tend to be rather a long time between each volume of each series. Therefore I would think it will be well into 2018 before I'm looking to get the third book, so I expect I'll probably be reading the second one in the autumn or maybe the turn of the year.
 
I've now read the second book. I love the overall epic story but I'm finding the individual books poorly written and edited.


Following on from the unsatisfactory cliff-hanger ending of the first book in this series, McDonald continues the epic conflicts of the Lunar ‘Dragons’ – the dynastic families that control the Moon. Lucas Corta is determined to get his revenge on the Mackenzies after their defeat and all but annihilation of the Corta dynasty. He seeks the backing of the Earth authorities, who fear an independent Moon, and the Vorontsovs who control all space commerce between Earth and Moon.

Wolf Moon is not an easy book to review; on the one hand the overall story arc is both intriguing and compelling but on the other the implementation again leaves much to be desired. The writing often felt sloppy with big holes that needed at least some filling and other parts that were over filled with unnecessary detail. And McDonald’s apparent obsession with fashion still irritated me throughout with passages like:

“Not for Lady Sun 1980s retro. She wears a faux-wool day suit from 1935, skirt to below the knee, wide-lapelled hip-length jacket, single button. Fedora, wide band. Classic style is never out of fashion.”

Occasional passages like this may add colour but almost every character entrance seems to be introduced with similar verbose descriptions. Whilst they’re easy enough to skip that doesn’t make them any the less irritating. At least this particular one left out the needless designer labelling that McDonald so often includes.

About the only improvement on the writing of the previous volume is that at least this one has a better, more complete ending, rather than just cutting off with all the major characters being left in various dangerous limbos as the previous book did. Add to that frequent examples of extremely poor copy editing and I’m left wondering whether the greater story arc is worth the effort and with the next book probably a year away I sadly suspect that by then I’ll be even less inclined to make that effort.
 
I should see Ian over the summer - if so, I'll try to find out what's happening!
Well Jo?
Did ya meet up with him?
Any feedback?
I've read the first one, Luna New Moon but don't want to commit to a long series. A trilogy fair enough
 

Similar threads


Back
Top