There Was Something on the Moon

Halt Passenger!

As you are now, so once was I.

As I am now, so shall you be.

Prepare for death, and follow me.

- New England gravestone motto


***SPOILERS***

'Rouge Moon' is the first book by Algis Budrys that I have ever read, but it will likely not be my last. Its no surprise that I would like the science fiction book as it is one of the main genres that I read. Some of my favorites being 'The Transall Saga' and 'A Princess of Mars'.

Algis Budrys does a good job of building up his characters but sadly not much else. More than half of 'Rouge Moon' is spent on getting to know our very 'Great Gatsby' like characters. Anyone who knows me knows that I detest how despicable the characters of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s most celebrated work are written. The movie adaptations however hold a place in my heart. Even though I also feel this way about the characters in 'Rouge Moon' it was the science fiction aspect that kept me hooked.

Dr. Edward Hawks is the lead scientist of a US government operation on the moon. However Dr. Hawks has never set foot on the moon himself. Instead he has created a machine that works as a 3D printer for genetic material. A person goes in to the machine and is cloned not once but twice. One clone is transmitted and comes to life in Dr. Hawks lab on earth and the other is transmitted to the moon. the body that originally went into the machine is no more. Both new clones share the same brain, and the clone that stays in the lab is kept in a dark and confined space so that it may witness everything that its other copy endures while on the moon. Unfortunately this also means the pain and experience of death. Once the clone in the lab is taken out of its confinement its brain separates from the other clone as it has its own experience and lives its own life. However so far all of the men whose clones Dr. Hawks has sent up to the moon and have shared the experience of death have suffered mentally, some even catatonic because of the experience. This changes when Dr. Hawks is introduced to Al Barker, a man unafraid of death and the only man to go into the machine and come out relatively sane.

Buy why send men up to the moon this way, and for what purpose when man has already successfully made it to the moon through space craft? Well while on the moon the US discovered a machine, a maze really that is completely booby trapped and has killed everyone who has ventured into it. By sending men to the moon the way he has Dr. Hawks is able to get a play by play from the clone still in the lab of the events going on in the machine on the moon. the government wants to know how to safely walk through the machine and come out the other side so they might figure out how to deconstruct it, weaponize it and use it to the US governments advantage.

"I looked at the stars, which are distant suns, and the night, which is the earth's shadow, and the snow, which is water undergoing a state-change, and I took the tears in my eyes and I made a wonderland."

Overall 'Rouge Moon' was fast paced which may be a reason that I didn't mind the characters as much as I did in 'The Great Gatsby' where there are literally whole pages dedicated to listing names of people who attended Gatsby's party. F Scott Fitzgerald really liked to fill his pages with lists in all of his writing, it just gets to be too much sometimes. I know a lot of people get defensive when I talk bad of 'The Great Gatsby' but that is just my opinion, and you have a right to your own.

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