Guest Post: Six-and-a-Half Books That Inspired Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon

Ian McDonald has spent the last few years writing award-winning SF that explores the social, cultural, economic, and political changes technology will inflict upon Earth in the near future. Between them, River of Gods and its companion collection Cyberabad Days (set in a 2047 India transformed by genetic tinkering), Brasyl (a time-jumping chronicle of life in the South American nation, with touches of cyberpunk), and The Dervish House (concerning terrorism in Turkey in 2027) seem to paint a complete, unsettlingly plausible picture of what’s in store for all of us here on Earth.
His new book shows us the future from an entirely different perspective; he breaks the surly bonds, but doesn’t travel too far from home. Luna: New Moon is a crime family drama set amid the warring families that control our moon’s mining colonies. We asked Ian to share with us a few of the books that inspired him to look upwards and wonder…

Super Nova and the Rogue Satellite, by Angus MacVicar
I was a member of a book club when I was in the Irish equivalent of elementary school. Once a quarter you got a newsletter from the Scoop Club, and there I saw Angus MacVicar’s Super Nova and the Rogue Satellite. Super Nova was a space lifeboat stationed on the Moon. I have no idea why the satellite went rogue, or what it did when it rogued, but I do remember being enthralled by Port Imbrium, the Moonbase, and the scientists and crews who lived there. Also in the same Scoop Club was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Bought and read that too but it wasn’t about the Moon. And in the same year, in the non-book world, came the first Moon Landing.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert A Heinlein
Has to be there, and it is. I read it voraciously as a young teen, and it, along with Double Star (which is The Prisoner of Zenda in spaaace), are the best things Heinlein ever wrote. It was a shock: the moon as a complete, integrated, sensual world, not just a base in a rock (even then I knew the economy of growing carbs to feed Earth made no economic and less ecological sense. That was the point.) All moon novels since have been in conversation with it, and I am no exception. But I didn’t re-read it before I embarked on this project. I wanted to be in conversation with what I remember of it. Like the vibrant, diverse, noisy underground cities, the AI, the main character’s disability. Then again there’s that boring old guy who constantly moralises. The icky attitudes towards women…

Earthlight/A Fall of Moondust, by Arthur C Clarke
I’m lumping these together because they seem to me part of the same fictional world. These are two Arthur C Clarke novels—the SF writer, Heinlein notwithstanding, I associate most with the moon. Earthlight, in which lunar settlements are caught up in an interplanetary war which the aggressors are making up as they go along, as no one has fought one before. This moon has lunar monorails and spaceship rescue (more space lifeboats!) involving human bodies in vacuum. A Fall of Moondust is another rescue story, this time of a “dust-cruiser” hit by a moonquake, which sinks to the bottom of a sea of dust. The thing I remember most clearly is where they try to keep their spirits up by calculating the probability of two people in a group having the same birthday. Clarke’s most famous evocation of the moon is of course cinematic, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It still looks stunning.

The Moon: Resources, Future Development, and Settlement, by David Schrunk, Bonnie L Cooper
This was my touchstone for the book; it gave me the hard science and the harder truths. Then hundreds of ways to make them work that I would never have thought of. Crucible, the refinery of rails that never stops moving, is one of them: indeed, the whole lunar rail network. Of course surface transport is the only way to get around—rockets are a hideous waste of precious resources—but you never think that until you read this book. It made me think like a moon settler.

Moondust, by Andrew Smith
Twelve humans have walked on the moon. When Andrew Smith wrote this outstanding book, there were nine living. There are fewer now. Soon there will be none. The moon landings are vanishing over the horizon. Andrew Smith tracks down the survivors, interviews them and finds something very different from “the right stuff.” The one constant in their experiences is that the moon changes everyone who sets foot on it. I’ve met a moonwalker, James Irwin, who died in 1991, the first Moonwalker to leave us. He found Christianity out there: his line was “it’s more important that Christ walks on Earth than man walks on the moon,” yet there was something even more otherworldy about him. For all the Moonwalkers, the most profound part of the experience seems not to have been standing, looking back at the Earth and seeing its astonishing isolation. A coda to this extraordinary book: no human has left Earth orbit since 1972.

Triton/Trouble on Triton, by Samuel R Delany
Okay a bit of a cheat because it’s not Earth’s moon, but it is definitively a moon; Neptune’s moon Triton. You either love Delany or you hate him, though it may take a couple of goes for your mind to roll down through the quincunx of his imagination into the final slot. I loved this pansexual, artistic, anarchic, civilized rich world, and I didn’t know why. I still do: in Bron we have one of SF true narcissists: he’s vain, shallow, manipulative, dishonest and manages to be unhappy in a world where everything is permitted. Its subtitle is ‘An Ambiguous Heterotopia’, and its joyful libertarianism influenced my lunar society of sexual, gender, racial and social freedom by personal negotiation. There is also a space war –millions die, offstage, which is where it should be, because, Triton is really All About Bron. And I still use the recipe for Bananas Foster.
Luna: New Moon is available September 22.