Red moom charlotte2/11/2024 And I like him for all those things.īut Red Moon reads like a TED Talk being given in the middle of a car chase. Fred Fredericks? He's a high-functioning quantum telephone engineer with a spectrum disorder who, at one point, spends six entire pages explaining the pilot wave interpretation of quantum mechanics to Qi (including a kitchen sink science experiment). He is a utopian realist, and his heroes are almost always scientists, not soldiers. No black-box magic or hand-wavy explanations for things that can't exist. There's no faster-than-light travel in a Kim Stanley Robinson book. He tells stories about things that work in the future, built (often) after the failings of things that don't work today. Yes, Robinson is something of a founding father in the world of hard science fiction. Give 'em a little moon murder and then they'll GLADLY stick around for my lecture on quantum cryptography! It feels like a spoonful-of-sugar-helps-the-medicine-go-down kind of situation. But in Red Moon you can really see the strings. Like puppets, his characters exist only to tumble into conversations about the things Robinson wants to talk about.Īnd yes, I understand that every story works that way. It bothers me, personally, because there's a gestalt sense to the entire novel, first page to last page, that Robinson had something really important he wanted to say about China, the role of technology and the politics of social upheaval, and that everything else (the plot, the characters, the poet Ta Shu especially) was gimmicked up exclusively to that end. On the other, there's Kim Stanley Robinson laying down an extended, 400-page riff on a future where an ascendant China has become the world's superpower and human law, politics, class and culture are all being reforged in the harsh environment of lunar colonies. So on the one hand, moon murder! And who doesn't love that? And so many actual battles are simply about two or ten or a million people sitting down and arguing about an idea, and the slow shift in who believes what. It's interesting if you care, less so you if you don't, and it's so disruptive that it seems like Robinson is deliberately trying to interrupt the flow of the action - because so much of actual life is about waiting, Red Moon seems to argue. Or rebellion, artificial intelligence and the gig economy. Hierarchies within the Communist party, perhaps. There are long (sometimes achingly long) sections where Fred and Qi do absolutely nothing but sit and wait and talk about things that need explaining - either things that the readers need explained, or things that Robinson just felt you might like to know about. And it seems that telling a story wasn't Robinson's primary goal here.īecause in between all of this, Red Moon is filled with digressions on orbital mechanics, boarding schools, Chinese social engineering, Maoist theory, cryptography and agriculture. It happens (most of the time) in clipped, rapid-fire sections where everyone seems to be running everywhere all the time. and Chinese intelligence agencies that ramps up into revolt and revolution throughout the course of the novel. There are car chases and foot chases, narrow escapes, explosions and occasional nick-of-time help from Ta Shu, a Chinese travel show host, sometime poet and all-around weird dude.Īll the chasing, capturing and escaping becomes a kind of proxy battle between U.S. Fred is accused of murder, taken into custody, escapes, goes on the run (along with a woman, Qi, who's illegally gotten pregnant on the moon). Fred wakes up in a hospital with no idea how this could've happened. A cold war being fought in vacuum silence by acronymical agencies.īut when Fred goes to deliver his telephone and shakes Chang's hand, both men end up poisoned - Chang fatally so. and China and the two nations exist there in an icy, less than perfect détente. There's a dark side and a light side, shadowed craters and shadowless plains. The moon, in Robinson's future, is a black-and-white place, literally. The story is about Fred Fredericks, a man sent to the moon to deliver a special kind of telephone - person-to-person, encrypted via quantum entanglement - to Chinese governor Chang Yazu. I know about the mechanics of tidally locked orbital bodies, and so much about feng shui. I know how farming on the moon would work. After reading Kim Stanley Robinson's new novel, Red Moon, I now know more about the growth cycles of bamboo than I ever thought I would.
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