Review: Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald

Luna: New Moon by Ian McDonald

Published: Gollancz/Tor, 2015

Series: Book 1 of Luna

Awards Nominated: BSFA Award

The Book:

“The Moon wants to kill you. Maybe it will kill you when the per diem for your allotted food, water, and air runs out, just before you hit paydirt. Maybe it will kill you when you are trapped between the reigning corporations--the Five Dragons--in a foolish gamble against a futuristic feudal society. On the Moon, you must fight for every inch you want to gain. And that is just what Adriana Corta did.

As the leader of the Moon's newest "dragon," Adriana has wrested control of the Moon's Helium-3 industry from the Mackenzie Metal corporation and fought to earn her family's new status. Now, in the twilight of her life, Adriana finds her corporation--Corta Helio--confronted by the many enemies she made during her meteoric rise. If the Corta family is to survive, Adriana's five children must defend their mother's empire from her many enemies... and each other.” ~goodreads.com

Surprise, I do actually still write book reviews!  One of Ian McDonald’s other novels that I have read is The Dervish House, which made me want to visit Istanbul. I still hope I can one day, since it sounds like a beautiful city, rich in culture and history.  Anyway, though it also had a very vivid setting, Luna most definitely did not make me want to visit the moon!

My Thoughts:

I’ve heard this book often described as Game of Thrones on the moon, but it seems to me to be closer to a multicultural, lunar Godfather (even to the extent of featuring five families). The original lunar colonists did not set about to shape a new society, but instead allowed their new world to be shaped by market forces and corporations that form around, essentially, mafia families.  The end result is a society with no criminal justice system, where charisma, money, physical violence and connections can get one out of any tough spot.  The only form of law is contract law--which contributes to making lunar relationships strangely businesslike--and contract conflicts seem to be resolved primarily by razzle-dazzle and single combat.  This all makes for one of the more unusual societies I’ve seen fiction, but it’s also one I would never want to live in.  

My favorite character in this novel was, by far, the elderly Adriana Corta.  I loved the chapters where she narrated her extraordinary life: her immigration to the moon, her romantic entanglements, and the building of her empire.  It was fascinating to see lunar society in these early stages, and Adriana’s story was full of intense risk, loss, and success.  Her children, on the other hand, seemed petty and overly fond of posturing.  Unfortunately, the younger generation makes up most of the story’s viewpoint characters.  This did not help me to become emotionally engaged. On the positive side, I enjoyed how the five families represented such different cultures, with origins from Ghana, Australia, Russia, China and Brazil. I enjoyed reading about Adriana’s childhood in Brazil, and in seeing the ways the younger generations, which can never physically return to Earth, hold to their cultural heritage.  We spend most of the time with the Brazilian family in this first novel, but it would also have been fun to get more insight into the other families.

The story built up very slowly, and seemed sometimes to not have much focus.  It seemed to bounce from one subplot to another--Adriana’s amazing life story, Lucasinho’s teenage rebellion and sexual conquests, Rafa’s relationship problems, Ariel’s career, and so on.  However, the story eventually comes together into a climactic final act.  It was an exciting conclusion, which both resolves this novel and points the reader toward what to expect in future novels.  On the other hand, I felt that the way some of the characters resorted to violence diminished the meaning of the maneuvering that had taken place earlier in the novel.  At least, it was very effective in showing how close to the surface chaos and violence lies in the kind of society the five families have created.  Though I did enjoy aspects of Luna: New Moon, I doubt I’ll be continuing on to the rest of the series.

My Rating: 3/5

Luna: New Moon is a family drama about essentially mafia on the moon.  It takes place after the moon has been colonized by humans, and a society dominated by five crime families/corporations has been established. The five families represent interesting selection of different Earth cultures, with the main focus on a family originating from Brazil.  For me, the history of the colonization of the moon, as related through the matriarch Adriana Corta’s life story, was the most fascinating part of the novel.  I was less into the family squabbles that engaged the younger generations of Cortas, which took up the bulk of the novel.  The story didn’t seem to have much focus in the beginning, but it did eventually culminate in an exciting conflict between families.  I think this is ultimately not the series for me, but it has a lot to offer readers who have more interest in organized crime stories and family dramas.

Review: King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald

King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald

Published: Bantam Spectra (1991), Open Road Integrated Media (2013)

Awards Nominated: Locus Fantasy Award

Awards won: Philip K. Dick Award and Prix Imagnales

The Book:

“In early-twentieth-century Ireland, life for Emily Desmond is that of the average teenage girl: She reads, she’s bored with school, and she has a powerful imagination. Then things begin to change. Her imagination is so powerful, in fact, that she wills a faerie into existence—an ability called mythoconsciousness. It’s this power that opens a dangerous door that she will never want to close, and whose repercussions will reverberate across time.

First to be affected is her daughter, Jessica, who, in the mid-1930s, finds that she must face her mother’s power by using the very same gift against her. Then, in [the 1980s], Jessica’s granddaughter, Enye, must end the cycle once and for all—but it may prove too powerful to overcome.”~goodreads.com

This is the second novel I’ve read by Ian McDonald, the first being The Dervish House. The subject and style are very different in King of Morning, Queen of Day.  It’s very interesting to see what a range of skill McDonald has, and I am interested to read more of his work.

My Thoughts:

King of Morning, Queen of Day is an unusual style of faerie story.  On the surface, especially with Emily’s story, many of the details are as you might expect: fantastical creatures luring away innocent young girls, and a dangerous portal into faerie.  However, as you get deeper into the explanation of ‘mythoconsciousness’ and how its power manifests in reality, everything begins to feel a lot less like magic and more like paranormal science. This feeling becomes progressively stronger as time moves forward through Jessica’s story and finally to Enye’s.  I think this development is intended to show how faerie adapts to fit into a changing world.  Myths and legends of this sort are not simply discarded, but forced to evolve to reflect the values and beliefs of society.  

The direction these changes take, however, is incredibly dark. Even in Emily’s story, the manifestations were dangerous and capable of considerable harm.  Their violence and danger become more extreme in the next two women’s stories, and they lack any of the caprice or trickster nature that I would naively associate with fairies.  Some of the violence, and one scene of disturbingly sexualized violence, seemed gratuitous to me.  In the end, I was not a huge fan of this general atmosphere of the book, especially as it became progressively grittier moving forward in time.

The novel is split into three stories, each following a different heroine in a different time period of Ireland. Each of the stories feel very grounded in history, and even Emily’s faerie obsession reminded me of the famous historical photo hoax .  While all of the heroines are connected by certain personality traits (impulsiveness, brattiness, disregard for authority), they each are very different women with different relationships with their world and their power.  Even the style of the narrative changes to reflect the personality and era of each of the women.  I found the three sections interesting in terms of seeing how the people and the area changed over time, but I never felt especially emotionally engaged with the characters. Overall,  there is quite a lot to like in King of Morning, Queen of Day, even if it did not completely click with me.

My Rating: 3.5/5

King of Morning, Queen of Day is a fantasy that follows several generations of women in Ireland.  Each of three stories that compose the novel is set in a different time period, and it was interesting to see the differences in the form of the supernatural ‘mythoconsciousness’ and the ways the three heroines respond to their power.  I also enjoyed how the writing style changes to reflect the personality of each heroine, and how the stories feel firmly grounded in each woman’s time and place.  I wasn’t a big fan of the style of supernatural grittiness, though, and I was never particularly attached to any of the characters. The novel definitely shows McDonald’s skill and versatility as a writer, but, so far, his science fiction is more up my alley.

Review: The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald

Published: Pyr, 2010

Awards: BSFA Award, John W. Campbell Award

Nominated: Arthur C. Clarke Award, Hugo Award, Locus SF Award

The Book:

“It begins with an explosion. Another day, another bus bomb. Everyone it seems is after a piece of Turkey. But the shockwaves from this random act of 21st century pandemic terrorism will ripple further and resonate louder than just Enginsoy Square.

Welcome to the world of The Dervish House; the great, ancient, paradoxical city of Istanbul, divided like a human brain, in the great, ancient, equally paradoxical nation of Turkey. The year is 2027 and Turkey is about to celebrate the fifth anniversary of its accession to the European Union; a Europe that now runs from the Arran Islands to Ararat. Population pushing one hundred million, Istanbul swollen to fifteen million; Turkey is the largest, most populous and most diverse nation in the EU, but also one of the poorest and most socially divided. It's a boom economy, the sweatshop of Europe, the bazaar of central Asia, the key to the immense gas wealth of Russia and Central Asia.

The Dervish House is [five] days, six characters, three interconnected story strands, one central common core—the eponymous dervish house, a character in itself—that pins all these players together in a weave of intrigue, conflict, drama and a ticking clock of a thriller.” ~barnesandnoble.com

I read The Dervish House as a part of my effort to read all of the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke Award Nominees. 

My Thoughts:

In some ways, this was a challenging book to read.  At first, there is very little in common between the many storylines, except that they all have some physical connection to the old dervish house at Adam Dede square.  Since the narrative skips constantly between each narrative thread, it is difficult, at first, to get any deep understanding of each story.  In addition, McDonald used a lot of Turkish and Islamic terms that were left unexplained, though they were often understandable through context.

The main characters are (and here I resort to bullet points):

• A disgraced former economics professor, Georgios Ferentinou, who is a member of the tiny remaining Greek community of Istanbul
• Nine year old ‘Boy Detective’ Can Durukan, who has a deadly heart disease, a lot of curiosity, and impressive toy ‘bots.
• Country girl Leyla, who is trying to make a name for herself as a marketing expert
• Slick businessman Adnan, who has a not-quite-legal scheme that could make him millions
• Adnan’s wife Ayse, an antique religious art dealer searching for a mythical Mellified Man
• Necdet Hasguler, who has been taken in by his brother’s newly formed Islamic shariat. Necdet started seeing djinn and the green saint Hizir after witnessing a tram bomb.

As you can see, that's quite a lot to introduce simultaneously.  Each of these characters’ plotlines interacts with the others, kind of like billiard balls on a table.  Sometimes they merely cross each other’s paths, sometimes they deflect each other, and sometimes they stick together for a time.  All of the threads don’t start to come together until near the end, and even then, I never really felt like they truly meshed into a coherent whole.

Even without a sense of coherence in the end, I did enjoy all of the individual stories.  While all of the main characters had their flaws, I was able to find something to appreciate in each of them.  There were also some scenes, mostly later in the book, that were particularly lyrical or emotionally effective.  The one that stands out the most in my mind is a pivotal scene for Adnan, where he shows through his actions exactly what kind of man he will allow himself to become in his pursuit of money.

Another strength of The Dervish House is McDonald’s vividly described near-future Istanbul.  I have never been to Turkey, so I have no idea if the Istanbul I have built up in my mind is anything like the one that actually exists. However, McDonald’s descriptions have left me with a very clear and detailed mental image of the physical city of Istanbul and its inhabitants. Beyond the physical presence of Istanbul, McDonald also presents a kind of ideological characterization of the city.  He illustrates a city both leaping into the future and bound to its past.  It’s a place that could be the birthplace of the Nanotech Revolution, the physical expression of the name of God, and the hiding place of the legendary honeyed corpse of a Mellified Man. This novel definitely gave me a desire to go and see the city for myself (maybe this summer—I hear short-term visas aren’t too hard to get). If the real Istanbul is anything like McDonald’s fictional representation, it must be a truly breathtaking place!

My Rating: 4.5/5

So much happens during the book that it’s hard to believe it all occurs within five days! However, since most of the plotlines are running in parallel, the action still sometimes seems to move slowly.  The many different storylines and characters made it initially hard to get into, but by the end I desperately wanted to know how everything worked out.  Once you get to know all of the characters, their distinct personalities and intricate, overlapping stories really drive the novel. The future city of Istanbul is also prominent in the story, and its society, along with its physical and ideological presence, influences the story significantly. While The Dervish House is a thoroughly entertaining read, the separate threads of story don’t mesh well enough into a coherent whole by the end to leave me completely satisfied.