Gunpowder Moon by David Pedreira
Cover designed by Paula Russell Szafranski
Published by HarperCollins Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I originally came across this book almost by accident. A branch of our local public library was going to be closed for the year for major renovations, and I'd decided to make a sweep of their science fiction collection and pickup anything that might interest me. When I noticed the title and cover blurb, my initial impression was of a science fiction police procedural on the Moon, similar to Steven Harper's Dead Man on the Moon.
However, as I began to read it, I realized that no, it was not a police procedural focused on the law-enforcement aspects of detective work. Instead, it's more on the order of a political and military technothriller, focusing on international tensions between the US and the People's Republic of China.
In the near future, a methane clathrate gun catastrophe sets off a period of rapid climate change that devastates much of the First World, reducing most of Europe to Third World levels of poverty. The US has managed to hang onto its technological civilization, but only because it has moved to mining He3 from the lunar regolith (a real thing that Apollo XVII moonwalker Harrison Schmidt has championed for decades). However, the People's Republic of China is also interested in that resource to maintain its own economy, and is willing to muscle in on other nations' claims if it thinks it can get away with it.
Like Dead Man on the Moon, this novel begins with the discovery of a corpse on the lunar surface. However, this one doesn't stay a John Doe for long -- unlike the body in Harper's novel, the one in this novel was clearly in the process of suiting up when he was ejected from the vehicle in which he was riding. His helmet, which would've saved his life if only he could've gotten it on in time, is found lying on the regolith only a few feet away, but out of reach. And since he's suited up, it's possible to identify him with reasonable ease.
He turns out to be Cole Benson, a rich twit who became a lunar miner, apparently because he thought it was a way to get some action and adventure on the High Frontier. He found it all right -- and it cost him his life. A fact that's discovered when a crew comes to find out why his drill station shut down.
The protagonist, Dechert, is a former naval aviator turned ground-pounder in the ongoing wars in the Middle East back on Earth. He's got PTSD because of the people he lost in a mission gone terribly wrong in that second part of his military career, and has come up to the Moon to get away from those horrors. Here, there's no room to screw up, not with an environment that can kill you dead if you don't do it right the first time.
At first Dechert and the other members of the lunar mining station crew think it's an accident. Rich twit got careless because he was used to being able to use money to buy off trouble. In fact, the Dead Astronaut even has a history of carelessness that has led to one major accident so severe that it nearly got him sent back to Earth on the next flight down.
However, a closer examination of the suit and other evidence points to deliberate sabotage by persons unknown. Suddenly everything changes. Given that it pretty much has to be the work of someone from one of the other mining operations, and the PRC is the only operation that has the resources to be a real threat, it suddenly goes from accident investigation to international incident. Suddenly the US government is sending a bureaucrat up to take a closer look. This man is so ill-trained and ill-suited for working on the lunar surface that Dechert pretty much as to nursemaid him through the process of investigating the site of the murder.
Amidst growing political and military tensions Earthside, the US sends up a unit of Marines to protect the miners. However, it seems to Dechert that these troops are just a little too eager for action -- are they actually being sent as a provocation? Might they even have secret orders to create a provocation if none can be found -- shades of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
This is especially concerning because Dechert has good interpersonal relations with his opposite number at the Chinese station. Lin Tzu is a direct descendant of Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese strategist (or so we're told -- apparently the author doesn't realize or has forgotten that Chinese puts the family name first rather than last), and while he's probably a member of the Chinese Communist Party out of necessity, he is first and foremost a Lunan and actually a decent human being who wants to keep the Moon a place where people of different nations work together, at least as amicable strangers.
The further things go, the more disturbing evidence turns up that people high up in America's political and military hierarchy actually want the conflict to go hot. Or at least they want to play chicken and think that they can get the Chinese to blink, much as JFK got the Soviet Union to blink back in the Cuban Missile Crisis during the original Space Race. Both the President and a very senior admiral are graduates of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, and have apparently been buddies ever since they roomed together during their plebe year.
Dechert is finally able to work out a solution, although it is not without its cost in blood. And he also pays a more personal price, discovering that the Moon is no longer the haven from his dark memories that it had been.
It's interesting to read this novel in tandem with Dead Man on the Moon and notice both the similarities and the differences. While both of them involve murders on the Moon, this novel is far more gritty on multiple levels. While the shirtsleeve environments of Luna City in Dead Man on the Moon are cramped and crowded as a result of the inherent scarcity and high value of pressurized volume, they're still rather classy in their appearance, as befits a place designed primarily as a university campus and a vacation spot for the ultra-wealthy. By contrast, the lunar habitats in this novel are built as places where hard-working blue-collar men and women live, where they maintain their equipment. So it's hardly surprising that the habitats in this novel are not merely crowded and cramped, but grubby and rough in feel.
It's interesting that, even as grim as the situation on Earth is described as being, there's a sense of hope about the world being described in this novel. Humanity hasn't turned its back on space, or left it entirely to robots. Humanity is establishing commercial activity on the Moon, and beyond cislunar space. There are references to human presence on Mars and the moons of Jupiter, which suggests a strong outward orientation of human views of the universe. If they can keep it up, and if it's possible to develop habitats in which children can be successfully gestated and raised to healthy maturity, boundlessness will be humanity's future, even if it takes thousands of years for human habitats to filter outward through the Kuiper belt and Oort Cloud to the stellar systems of the other stars in the Local Group.
Buy Gunpowder Moon from Amazon.com
Review posted March 31, 2022.
