Earlier this month, many of us were thrilled to learn that four astronauts had been selected for a mission to orbit Earth’s Moon, followed by the Artemis III Moon landing mission set to launch in late 2025. Although robot explorers have been sent to the Moon, humans last visited the Moon in 1972. That’s a hiatus that reminds me of the gap in visits to the South Pole, which went unvisited between 1912 and 1956.
However, just because humans were not visiting the Moon in actuality didn’t prevent SF authors from imagining what it might be like were humans to establish an enduring presence there. Indeed, the lack of actual Moon bases permitted imaginations to roam freely, as these five post-Apollo1 examples should make clear.
The Barbie Murders by John Varley (1978)
Humans brought their vices with them when they settled the Moon. As a lunar cop, Lieutenant Anna-Louise Bach’s job means investigating the same sorts of crimes she would face were she working in a Terrestrial city of a previous century, However, increasingly sophisticated technology introduces complications no 20th century investigator had to unravel. Take, for example, the Barbie Murders.
The Temple of the Standardized Church uses surgery to remove the genitals of devotees and transform them into identical copies, one virtually indistinguishable from the next. Uniformity comforts the faithful. When a serial killer begins targeting members of the church, uniformity complicates investigation. Bach is nothing if not determined, however, and will go to great lengths to arrest the guilty party.
This setting2 has advanced surgical technology which is able to reshape flesh at whim. It does not, however, appear to have anything like DNA testing, which would have simplified matters greatly. It does have offensive slang terms, an example of which would be calling the Temple’s member “Barbies,” a term unauthorized by the faithful and by the Mattel company…
On an unrelated note, the 1980 collection The Barbie Murders was later retitled Picnic on Nearside.
Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford (1993)
Teen Matt Roney lives on a developed Moon: a nation that won its independence decades ago, a world that is part of an interstellar trade network. Although Matt’s father might point out how limited lunar resources are, no Lunarian is homeless or hungry. This does not mean they are all happy.
Some teens might complain that everything of significance has been accomplished, that there is nothing left for them to do. Matt’s problem is exactly the opposite. Many alternatives present themselves. To choose one means rejecting all the others. How then can Matt be certain he will select the best alternative?
This being a John M. Ford novel, the author has lovingly worked out the intricate details of lunar infrastructure, then included in the novel only those details about which the characters would logically reflect. He trusted readers to fill in the blanks.
If you aren’t interested in blank-filling, Ford’s essay “To the Tsiolkovsky Station” provides more details. It can be found in the NESFA-published volume, From the End of the Twentieth Century.
The Next Continent by Issui Ogawa (2003) (Trans. Jim Hubbert 2010)
Tae Toenji believes she knows how to make lunar tourism pay where all previous efforts have failed. Her key insight: wealthy couples will pay exorbitant fees for lavish weddings. A lunar wedding facility could cater to the hyper-rich at hundreds of millions of yen per person! Since Tae is only thirteen, others will have to handle the heavy lifting of turning her vision into reality.
Tae’s grandfather Sennosuke Toenji, chairman of Eden Leisure Entertainment, contracts the task to Gotoba Engineering. Engineer Aomine Sohya is selected for a central role in the decade-plus projects, possessing as he does (or so his boss believes) an ideal combination of talent and expendability. Can Tae’s vision be made reality? People like Sohya will find out.
One of the things that jumped out at me on reading this was that many characters are well aware that the financial case for a lunar wedding chapel is tenuous, although they are careful to ensure the CFO is kept in the dark about that. Page later I discovered that the actual goal of the project is not the stated goal and since that true purpose is a spoiler, I will restrict myself to a simple “But surely, therapy would been more cost-effective?”
Moon You by Cho Seok (2018-)
In this ongoing webtoon, the world effort to save civilization was 10/11th successful. Only a small fraction of the approaching asteroid impacted on Earth. Of course, 1/11th of an apocalypse is still terrible. Resupply missions to the Moon colony will be affected, so it is decided that all the lunar staff will return to Earth before the impact.
One staff member, Moon Yoo, is left behind. He is overlooked, which is understandable, because he is introverted, lacks friends, and is so retiring as to be unmemorable.
Yoo is trapped up on the Moon. He briefly considers ending it all but discovers that available methods either do not work or scare him. Of course, he need not die immediately. The lunar facility is automated and filled with more supplies than Yoo can consume in decades. Yoo settles into a life of boredom and melancholy.
Unbeknownst to Yoo, his travails are intermittently transmitted to a recovering Earth. For the people of Earth, the fragmentary messages paint an inspirational picture of a heroic figure struggling to survive on the hostile Moon. That’s not how it seems to him.
This webtoon has a certain melancholy charm, like the manga Girls’ Last Tour.
The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal (2020)
A meteor impact has devastated much of the Earth and catastrophically affected the climate. Runaway greenhouse effects will turn the planet into a new Venus. Very luckily for humanity (and such species as we might see fit to preserve), the process is slow enough that a concerted effort might establish a self-sustaining community on Mars before life on Earth becomes untenable.3
A functioning Moon colony is key to successful Mars colonization. Protagonist Nicole Wargin is a key player, both in her own right as one of the Lady Astronauts that give this series its title (this is the third book) and also because of her influence on her highly-placed, ambitious politician husband. When sabotage threatens the lunar space program, Nicole gets to develop a whole new skill set: counter-espionage.
Who would sabotage the colonization effort? Not all of Earth’s remaining human inhabitants are on board with the efforts to colonize Mars. Many groups suspect (with good reason) that they will deemed surplus to requirements and left behind. “Saving some is better than none” is probably a lot more convincing to people who think they will be part of the rescued remnant than those who are convinced that they will be left behind to die.
***
There are, of course, many post-Apollo Moon base stories I could have used but didn’t (Bova’s Millennium, for example, or Rusch’s The Disappeared, for another). If I missed one of your favourites, feel free to mention them in comments below.
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
[1]“Post-Apollo” means works that precede the Apollo landings will not be mentioned. For example, I won’t include C. L. Moore’s “Lost Paradise” (1936), a novelette in which we learn why the Moon is no longer habitable. Short version: it’s Northwest Smith’s fault. It’s *always* Northwest Smith’s fault.
[2]“The Barbie Murders” was initially set in a different continuity from Varley’s Eight Worlds works. Varley later changed his mind and merged the two continuities.
[3]Presumably this universe’s Geoffrey Landis is advocating aerostat communities as a means of surviving the new Earth. I’d link, but links don’t work in Tor.com footnotes.
A curious case is the movie Moon Zero Two, which came out a few months after Apollo 11. Since it obviously started production before that, it’s kind of hard to say whether it should be considered pre- or post- Apollo. It’s one of the better movies to be screened on MST3K and has a great animated opening credit sequence.
On this topic I feel compelled to recommend for folks the audiofiction podcast Moonbase Theta Out. The first season has a single voice actor (Leeman Kessler, mayor of Gambier, Ohio and of “Ask Lovecraft” fame), the communication officer for the last active Moonbase, giving his weekly reports on the progress of said Moonbase’s shutdown process. Of course, things eventually get a bit complicated and further seasons expand the cast and scope of the show greatly. A future dominated by megacorps and city-stat enclaves with a special focus on the Moon. Full of fascinating queer characters of all sorts it’s a great one and you can knock off the first season in an hour or so if you like. https://monkeymanproductions.com/moonbase-theta-out/
Much of the second season of ’s For All Mankind concerns the wild and wacky antics between Unistat’s moonbase and the Soviet one on the other side of the crater.
Glad you acknowledged Rusch’s Retrieval Artist novels, as they are favorites of mine. Allen Steele also wrote a couple of linked lunar-base novels that I quite enjoyed, The Tranquility Alternative and Lunar Descent. I recommend both series!
There’s the execrable example of Space: 1999 (“marked down from 2001” — Mark Chartrand).
A much better, much more recent example is Ian McDonald’s Luna trilogy, which takes a very dim view of the future; where Ford’s youths learn pressure-suit tech and have to answer questions about it before taking a stroll, McDonald’s thrill-crazy upper-class adolescents sprint unsupported from one airlock to another. OTOH, the idea of members of rival corporations settling differences with knife duels has a certain appeal. McDonald’s politics are clear, but the result is more complex than (e.g.) Kritzer’s Seastead stories.
For me, in this subsubgenre, the gold standard is The Moon and the Other by John Kessel. Not only does it tell a fascinating utopian mystery, its moon science and lived-in world is an absolute wonder to behold. It feels like real Moon to me.
A couple of fairly obvious additionals:
Andy Weir’s Artemis — a fairly obvious descendant of the Heinlein juveniles (like the Ford in this). Not quite as good as The Martian or Operation Hail Mary, but still a lot of fun.
The film Iron Sky, a Nazis-on-the-Moon story. Haven’t seen it. A no-star cast. 44% on Rotten Tomatoes’s critics scale, 37% from audience reviews. Sounds pretty dire. Oh, and it’s said to be a comedy.
@7:
Iron Sky veers between chucklingly good (Nazi spacesuits with coal-scuttle space helmets) and cringe-worthy bad (an obvious Sarah Palin-parody as US President and the indiscriminate chucking about of nuclear weapons). It’s worth a look if you’re into schlock sci-fi. However, I warn you it’s better than its sequel.
Neil Clarke ed The Eagle has landed anthology.
The “Space Cops” trilogy by Duane and Morwood. Early 90s. First one is about illegal addictive (and permanently damaging to users) drugs on the moon. Space opera, fun, and ignore the continuity errors between books.
I loved Varley’s The Barbie Murders. I would also recommend the short story Bagatelle which is the first of his stories featuring the Moon colony and Anna Louise Bach.
I’ve been under the impression that the Iron Sky movies have incredibly funny over the top trailers (Hitler riding a dinosaur, dancing bare-chested Putin), but you wouldn’t want to sit through the actual movie.
ps – I purchased a product recently where the CAPTCHA challenge was “Select all pictures of cats wearing pirate hats.” I think Tor.com needs to up its game.
I enjoyed Andy Weir’s Artemis, but was not convinced by the viability of the moon colonies it portrayed. In fact, I can only think of one moon colony story that has been convincing to me, although there are many I have enjoyed. The one story is listed here, The Relentless Moon, where the imminent destruction of Earth’s biosphere changes the entire game, and makes the benefits outweigh the costs.
The moon is a barren desert at the bottom of a fairly steep gravity well, and offers nothing that can’t be found among the asteroids, which are filled with resources that can be gathered with much less rocket power and reaction mass being required.
I am rather frustrated that only two Ogawa novels have been translated into English so far.
I’m assuming the absence of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a mere oversight.
Space: 1999
I liked Artemis, although it definitely was the sophomore novel and fell behind perhaps because it didn’ t have the group mind editing The Martian got.Still, while Artemis was not as good as the Book Martian it was at least as good as the Movie Martian.
Would Futurama be worth mentioning here? It took a cynical look at the Moon as a cheap sideshow amusement park which I found very memorable.
15: I use an idiosyncratic definition of post-Apollo that doesn’t include books predating or coincident with Apollo.
I’m terribly fond of the Moon as it shown in Schlock Mercenary ;)
@15 DigiCom – waves – Sorry, MIAHM is 1966, just misses the cutoff.
The South Pole was unvisited between 1912 and 1956? What about the 1930 Miskatonic University expedition, shortly thereafter chronicled by Howard Phillips Lovecraft? Admittedly the expedition was widely considered to be a disaster, to the extent that the University and authorities denounced Mr Lovecraft’s account as nothing more than wild fiction, but even so – some historical accuracy, please!
@17 – that episode of “Futurama” also managed a lunar retelling of the old “Farmer’s Daughter” joke!
Moon You: The post links to Webtoons, which for some reason only has the first nine episodes. Novelcool seems to have all (?) 33 of them. I /think/ the story is complete?
Also: Moon You is pretty clearly a satire / deconstruction of various SFnal tropes, and in particular of The Martian. I mean this in a good way — it’s done very well! It’s basically “What if instead of a hyper-competent scientist-astronaut in a tense battle for survival requiring brains and skill, it was an ordinary schlub who wasn’t really in a tense battle with anything”. And the author actually makes that pretty interesting and funny.
Also-also: apparently Moon You was made into an animated movie called “Moon Man”, which was released in China last summer, and which grossed over $400 million. Not a typo: nearly half a billion dollars. No idea whether it’s available in the US.
Doug M.
@13: “The moon is a barren desert at the bottom of a fairly steep gravity well, and offers nothing that can’t be found among the asteroids, which are filled with resources that can be gathered with much less rocket power and reaction mass being required.”
Depends what you want to do with the resources. Getting resources off the moon into earth orbit with a mass driver is going to be a lot cheaper than getting resources from the asteroid belt. I’m not certain that it’s more expensive to get resources from the moon to Mars than from the asteroid belt.
As for tv series, i liked The Silent Sea (2021), where the moon base has become a deserted deathly trap, after studying a dangerous possible Earth life saving form of water, and a mission is sent to obtain the results, but might be compromised by spies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Silent_Sea_(TV_series)
Although the parameters listed for consideration automatically eliminates most of Heinlein’s moon stories, there are two that still qualify. “The Cat Who Walks Through Walls” and “To Sail Beyond the Sunset” both include lunar events. The granddaddy though would be John Varley’s “Steel Beach” which is situated entirely on Luna. On the subject of film Sam Rockwell’s one man (not counting clones) performance in “Moon”, surly deserves a shout out. I am purposefully omitting “Moon Fall” from this comment because of its dismally poor premise.
The moon is a barren desert at the bottom of a fairly steep gravity well, and offers nothing that can’t be found among the asteroids, which are filled with resources that can be gathered with much less rocket power and reaction mass being required.
That really doesn’t sound right. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Solar_system_delta_v_map.svg
I make it LEO to Moon surface delta-V 5.66km/s. There are virtually no (7 to be precise) asteroids with delta-V from LEO of less than 7 km/s; Vesta is 8.5km/s, Ceres is 9.32 km/s and so on.
And the other thing the Moon has a lot more of is, of course, sunlight. At 2.8AU, Ceres receives 13% of the sun that Earth (or the Moon) do. Whatever you’re doing on Ceres, if you want it to be solar-powered, you’re going to need eight times as much solar panel area as you would to do it on the Moon.
A third thing in the Moon’s favour is that there’s only one big one of it. You can set up one lot of infrastructure, one landing site etc, and centralise your efforts to economise. But the asteroids are inaccessible from each other. You can’t set up a station on Ceres and use that to support your exploitation of Vesta, because in delta V terms Ceres is further away from Vesta than the Earth is (or at least further away than LEO is).
See also Apollo’s Outcasts (2012) by Allen Steele. Set in late 21st century, there’s an international Lunar colony, engaged in both scientific research and regolith mining/processing. It’s effectively homage to Heinlein juveniles, what with 16-year-old male protagonist (who’s dumb around girls) and well thought out, realistic solutions to challenges of a viable Lunar society. There’s also good, realistic treatment of combat, as the Lunar Search and Rescue squads are forced to become a militia when a rogue US President sends troops to seize the colony.
27: Aren’t the interesting delta vees the other way? For example, the transfer delta vee from 1982 DB to Earth (at the right time) is only a bit more than Nolan Ryan’s best fastball. Aerobraking or lithobraking could account for the delta vee to put the payload in orbit or somewhere on the surface.
How did that post twice?
I remember from old discussions on rec.arts.sf.science that one could greatly reduce the delta vee from Jupiter’s trojan asteroids to Earth by sending payloads via Jupiter. The catch is that this consumed a lot more time than a direct orbit.
Greg Bear’s Heads was a neat little novel incorporating lunar culture and politics, corpsicles, cryophysics, and cults (specifically, Scientology in all but name).
@30: If you’re sending a steady stream of product, it’s still a win as soon as the pipeline fills.
David Weber’s Mutineer’s Moon series is worth mentioning – there are colonies on the moon as well as the weirder stuff going on inside.
@33 Mutineer’s Moon was fun, just for the audacity of the concept!
And thanks to all who challenged my assumptions about lunar versus asteroidal resources, and did so with data! Great discussion!
@21: The article specified going to the South Pole. The Miskatonic expedition was just one of many Antarctic expeditions which had no intention of going to the actual Pole which occurred between those two trips.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Antarctic_expeditions
@26 Is Moon Fall the series by James Rollins (thank you, Wikipedia)?
I did enjoy the novel Moonfall by Jack McDevitt. Of course the novel isn’t exactly about a moon base, but one figures prominently in the story.
@12 I have to admit, pictures of cats in pirate hats sounds like more fun than the pictures of bicycles and crosswalks I just got.
1951, but “If I Forget Thee, O Earth”.
A lot of Arthur C. Clarke’s stories have basically a dead Earth, usually after nuclear war I think, not always. In “If I Forget Thee”, Earth viewed from the Moon is described as glowing with radioactivity, which may be doubtful; ordinarily, if you can see a glow, then you’re dead almost immediately. But the glow is radiation interacting with the atmosphere. Viewing from space, you may get all glow and no other radiation?
Perhaps Clarke was assuming that weapon prototypes would continue to be more destructive and radioactive, somehow, between time of writing and when they were actually used.
Robert Carnegie @37: It would depend on the type of radiation. Alpha and beta particles are blocked by a short distance in air (and a much shorter distance in solid matter). The resulting ionization could result in a visible glow without too much hard radiation in the form of X-rays and gamma radiation… I think? Definitely true if phosphorescent materials are involved such as zinc sulfide, as in the intentionally-luminous paints, though that’s not what would be happening in the case of large areas destroyed by nuclear weapons. If the glow is associated with gamma radiation, I’m not sure. If one assumes the case of a planet radioactive enough to glow dimly, as seen from a lunar distance in a darkened sky, it seems plausible to me that a brief exposure could be harmless — the amount of emission wouldn’t have to be great for it to be visible. I don’t know how well X-rays and gamma radiation would be absorbed by the full thickness of Earth’s atmosphere.
My current backpack book is Asimov’s Pebble in the Sky, which mentions that many areas of the Earth are radioactive enough that their glow can be seen faintly at night. His later books retcon the radioactivity to be not a result of nuclear warfare but because the strong/weak nuclear forces got tweaked on a planetary scale, IIRC.
Earth viewed from the Moon is described as glowing with radioactivity, which may be doubtful; ordinarily, if you can see a glow, then you’re dead almost immediately.
I think you can stand beside a swimming-pool reactor and see a Cherenkov glow without being exposed to very much radiation at all.
But to make the earth visibly glow from Cherenkov radiation requires a lot of radioactivity. Say the human eye can perceive a blue glow of 10-9 W/m2 emitted from an otherwise dark Earth. That requires a source putting out about 800 megawatts of Cherenkov light. One cosmic ray particle with energy of 1 GeV gives rise to three blue light photons of Cherenkov radiation with energy of 7.5 eV.
Producing Cherenkov photons is a highly inefficient way of lighting your house, or indeed planet. To make the Earth glow, you’d need a radiation source putting out 80 petawatts. Four trillion tonnes of cobalt-60 would do the trick.
@11 I enjoyed the “Space Cops” books, but the fist one is set in an L5 Colony, not on the moon. The second book is set on Mars, and the third starts in the asteroids, but ends in earth orbit IIRC.
Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust is set entirely on the moon (and near-moon space), and the engineering challenges of working in the Lunar environment are major plot points Clarke’s early novel Earthlight is also set on the moon, but I don’t recall it as strongly. It is also not post-Apollo. Come to thinmk of it, neither is A Fall of Moondust is although it feels as if it is to me.
What about Niven’s The Patchwork Girl? A murder mystery, with the lunar environment important to the plot.
Two of Asimov’ Wendel Urth mysteries are set or partly set on the Moon and have lunar conditions as a significant factor: “The Key” and “The Singing Bell” IIRC.
@37/38/39: I mean, I think the story also says that the Moon colonists live on the far side and normally can’t see Earth. To go and look at it is an journey, a solemn pilgrimage, an inspiration. So, maybe this Earth is bombarding the Moon with deadly radiation. For quite a long time to come, no doubt. And for that reason, the colonists live on the far side.