Jealousy has kept us safe for fifty years.Īnd that's the nut of things. What they fear is someone else taking the moon, so they watch each other. The terrestrial states have always envied our freedom, our wealth, our achievements. Learn history, boy: the Outer Space Treaty bars Earth's national governments from claiming and controlling the moon - this is why we are administered by a corporation, not a political party. And one of those families - the Brazilian Cortas - were wiped from the map. Blood ( lots of blood) watered the regolith. And this held right up until the moment it didn't. For the sake of stable markets and profits. The five families kept an edgy détente for years. Its laws are negotiable (particularly among those with enough money, enough power or enough lawyers) but also unbreakable. That, and an extreme libertarian experiment in vested anarchy. Rare earth metals and helium were the prizes that the moon offered. A future moon, colonized decades ago by five powerful corporate families - one each from Australia, China, Brazil, Russia and Ghana - and run like a delicate business partnership. In Luna: New Moon he gave us what the title promised twice: The moon. There are no wasted moves, nothing that isn't vital because, in the end, everything is vital. Spare, simple, elegant when he needs to be (an entire landscape taken in at a glance), deep and meaty when he wants to be (extended riffs and spooling digressions on jazz, lunar architecture, virtual sex, knives), he does his work like an artisan pulling a sculpture from stone. No one builds a world like Ian McDonald does. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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