Moon Beam by Travis S. Taylor and Jody Lynn Nye
Cover art by Dominick Harman
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
I grew up on 1950's science fiction about trips to the Moon and Mars. My first chapter book was Robert Silverberg's Lost Race of Mars, which my dad read to me one chapter a night. A year or two later I discovered Richard Elam's Young Visitor to Mars, which had a similar theme, but was treated a little differently. Later I discovered the various Heinlein juveniles.
At the time, they still seemed to be something that could be in our future. It hadn't been that long since the Apollo lunar landings wound down, and the hiatus on US space flight would just last until they could get the Space Shuttle flying. Then we'd go back to the Moon and onward to Mars -- when I was in high school and assigned to draw a picture of ourselves twenty years in the future, I drew one of myself completely encased in futuristic space armor, doing some kind of work in a laboratory with a window showing a moonscape beyond it. I genuinely believed that, by the turn of the millennium, we'd have permanent bases on the Moon.
Except it didn't happen that way. The Space Shuttle was fundamentally flawed, and was implemented in a way that locked the US space program into it for decades, foreclosing other options. Worse, the funding for the space station it was supposed to build was not made available until the orbiters were near the end of their operational life, and then was done in a minimalistic and very grudging way. Effectively, the Space Shuttles were wasted on tasks that really didn't make use of the system's unique capabilities, and served mostly to create the illusion that we were moving forward in space when in fact we were going around and around in circles. At least one and possibly two whole generations' futures wasted, down the drain to make-work when we could've been moving on to building moonbases, expanding them into real settlements, moving out toward Mars.
And there are other ways in which those 1950's visions of our future in space have become dated, beside the over-optimistic technology. There's the whole business of Mars as home of ancient civilizations, whether still clinging to life or present only in the form of ruins long abandoned. And the society in which the characters live is pretty much the 1950's projected forward in space.
In fact, most of my childhood favorites are so much Yesterday's Tomorrow that I would hesitate to suggest them to a young person of the age I was when I discovered them. Either those books would bore young readers with a view of a world without the computer and communications technology they take for granted, or the books would confuse the young reader who hasn't developed a sense of history yet and doesn't understand that these books show extrapolations that history has passed by.
While many publishers have tried to produce YA sf that captures the sense of excitement about space we find in the old books but reflects modern astronomy and astronautics, the results have typically been disappointing. All too often, they come across as Problem Novels, with characters struggling with dysfunctional families or other major life problems even as they confront the challenges of future technologies. Or the books are so bogged down with Political Correctness lecturing that they have that sour mediciney taste of Good For You rather than being Fun like the old ones. Also, there seems to be a tendency to put much sharper restrictions on how much the young protagonist can accomplish, which makes them less interesting and exciting to a young reader.
Which was why discovering this novel was such a delight. It's the story of Barbara Winton, an Iowa farm girl who's a huge fan of the Bright Sparks, a group of young people who do all kinds of fascinating things on the Moon under the mentorship of Dr. Keegan Bright. However, because her family's farm is always teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, she can't afford the membership that would get her into the private forums with the really interesting background stuff about their reality show. For instance, she has no idea why Pam got removed from the group, but she has a good idea that the information is in the private area.
When we first meet Barbara, she's out in the field, repairing a balky harvester, all by herself other than her trusty PDE (a sort of handheld with the power of a present-day supercomputer and seriously sophisticated AI), Fido. Because of her family's precarious financial situation, all their equipment is old and in need of continual repair. As a result, sometimes the repairs don't go as planned -- as is the case this time. Instead of resolving the problem, it locks the system into a feedback loop that has the potential to junk the whole machine.
However, she mcguivers a solution to force a shutdown, then resolves that problem and finally has the harvester running. So it's back to the farmstead in the old pickup truck she's been driving on the farm since the age of fourteen, the age she was when she found it up on blocks behind a shed and decided to make it her project.
There's a package waiting for her, and the delivery driver can't leave until she's accepted it. (The description of his uniform suggests he's from UPS -- is this a future in which the Post Office has finally gone belly-up and all delivery is handled by commercial carriers?) It turns out to be a special message from Dr. Bright -- a science and engineering challenge she participated in was in fact a contest for the next member of the Bright Sparks to replace Pam, and Barbara came out on top. She needs only accept her selection and she'll be off to Houston for training at Johnson Space Center.
The next chapter takes up as she's arriving at Mare Tranquillitatis where humanity's first permanent space settlement has been constructed adjacent to the original lunar landing site. Much as in Andy Weir's Artemis, the Apollo XI landing site is a museum and tourist attraction, and one of the most iconic architectural elements of Armstrong City is the huge hotel tower where the tourists stay.
After a momentary bobble of tongue-tied fangirl when she first encounters Dr. Bright, Barbara jumps right in with the team and is preparing for an expedition to install a radio telescope on Farside. However, no one wants to talk about what the deal is with Pam's departure, and that unwillingness makes Barbara uneasy.
However, there's no time to worry about it when she and the other three older kids head off to Farside for the construction site. All four of them have turned eighteen and are legal adults, so they're being given the project to do on their own while Dr. Bright leads the two younger kids on a much smaller-scale radio telescope construction EVA right there at Armstrong City.
It may seem strange to think that kids barely out of high school would be given the responsibility of driving all the way over to Farside on a packed-regolith road to build a radio telescope and its support facilities, with nothing but a series of Yagi antennas alongside the road like old-fashioned telegraph poles to connect them to civilization. But it's quite common for people on a frontier to grow up fast and assume adult responsibility as soon as they are capable. Laura Ingalls taught school while all of fifteen, and would marry Almanzo Wilder shortly thereafter -- and this was not considered unusual at the time, however shocking it may be to modern readers.
The trek around the Moon to the site for the radio telescope is a two-day journey, and there are no convenient motels on the way. So they have to camp out, which means setting up special Moon tents with integral life-support systems on a reasonably flat space about halfway through. Barbara is inside and taking off her space suit when she's suddenly overwhelmed by the fragility of the enclosure that keeps her alive. Fortunately her roommate Jan is able to reassure her that the systems are carefully designed to be triple-redundant, and she's not in immediate danger of a horrific demise if a micrometeorite should strike the tent. She's able to recover her composure and sleep soundly.
However, the second day proves longer than anticipated. Fatigue and highway hypnosis takes its toll, and one of the guys goes off the road, with the result that his vehicle ends up hung up on a rock. For a moment things look grim, until one of the other kids suggests using the bucket of their specially modified Bobcat to hoist the rear axle off the rock. It sounds like a good idea -- except Barbara remembers a neighbor who permanently damaged a tractor that way. Here, on the untamed High Frontier, they can't risk having a vehicle that doesn't drive right, so they have to come up with a better way, which involves using the spare tire as a cushion.
Although the team manages to mcguiver their way through the problem, it still takes enough time that they are too tired to drive safely to the work site. Much as they want to get started working first thing the next day, Barbara points out they'll lose a lot more time -- and possibly worse -- if weariness leads to another accident. So they find a good place to pitch their tents and spend another night camping out on the lunar surface.
When they finally arrive, the first order of business is to set up the permanent habitats, which they will use as a construction shack while they're building the telescope, and which scientists and technicians will use when they come to do maintenance. Like the tents, these are inflatables, but because they are designed to be permanent, they will cure to hardness in UV light, after which they will be covered with a protective layer of lunar regolith.
Once the habitats are set up and curing and essential supplies moved inside, our young frontiersmen and -women begin the process of grading the crater that will become the dish of the radio telescope. They're making good headway, and are looking forward to being able to start setting up the parts of the dish.
Back at base, all is not well. Neil, one of the younger kids, comes to Dr. Bright red-eyed and very worried. He's been up all night monitoring one of the sunspots, which is behaving in an ominous fashion. A quick consultation with solar astronomers and the folks at NOAA and it becomes clear: the Sun is about to hock a hairball. A Coronal Mass Ejection, which will send a stream of plasma, charged particles, and hard X-rays straight at the Earth-Moon system. There's no time to get the kids back to the safety of the main settlement, so it's essential to work out some way to protect them where they are.
After some consultation back and forth, they determine that the habitats are cured enough that, with an increase in the internal air pressure, they can tolerate having the necessary layer of regolith piled on them. To reduce the amount of regolith that needs to be moved, they'll park two of their vehicles beside the habitat, since all three vehicles need to be covered to protect their electronics from system-generated EMP from the CME.
They get done in the nick of time and hunker down, worrying that they might have missed a spot somewhere. They remind one another that they have a radiation detector as part of the standard equipment of the habitat they've built, and settle in as best they can to ride the storm out.
However, the storm proves harder than anyone expected, and is causing some unexpected problems. Most obviously, it knocks out their communications with base, so they can't call upon the advice of their mentor. But it's also causing problems with critical systems within their own habitat -- and with no ability to phone home, they have to mcguiver solutions to these problems all by themselves, with their lives hanging on the line. Only when they've assured their survival can they even think about restoring communications through a most extraordinary makeshift.
Worse, those communications bring more bad news: there's another CME incoming, bigger and nastier than the first. While that one lasted only a few hours, this one may well last more than a day. Somehow they have to find a longer-term solution for their life-support issues, one that will buy them over a day rather than a few hours.
And as if that's not bad enough, there's trouble back home. The incoming shuttle from Mars has taken damage to its control systems and is on a collision course with Armstrong City. The crew is ejecting and hoping for a soft landing of their escape pod, while everyone inside the settlement is suiting up and heading for shelters.
This is a Baen book, so you can be sure our heroes will work something out. And since it's aimed at YA's, there's not going to be any horrible tragic endings for any of the named characters. But while it ends with triumph, it's clear there's going to be a lot of cleanup to do before anyone can go back and finish building that radio telescope on Farside.
One thing I found particularly neat was the reference to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" being over a century old. That would put this novel's setting sometime in the 2060's or 70's. It's the same period that my stories "Phoenix Dreams" and "Phoenix in the Machine<,/a>" are set, but it's a much more optimistic future, of a permanent settlement on the Moon and the beginnings of a base on Mars, rather than a future in which no one has traveled in space in over thirty years. But by the time this novel was written, the successes of SpaceX were making things look more optimistic than 2013, when I first began writing in that 'verse, when the Space Shuttle orbiters had been decommissioned and NASA's own efforts to replace it were going in circles.
Speaking of the Space Shuttle, I had one brief moment of suspension of disbelief being stretched to the limit when the Mars shuttle was described in terms that made it clear the writer was thinking in terms of a Space Shuttle orbiter, when there was no sense of it having those characteristics. I'm thinking this is evidence that Dr. Taylor did the ideas, perhaps an outline or even a brief treatment, and Jody Lynn Nye wrote the majority of the text. It feels like the sort of mistake that would be made by someone whose go-to image for the word "shuttle" is still the Space Shuttle orbiters.
Unlike the old Heinlein juveniles, which were all stand-alones, this book is the first in a series. The second volume, Moon Tracks, is already out, and one can hope that a third will be forthcoming in a year or two.
Buy Moon Beam from Amazon.com
Review posted April 12, 2012.
