The core concept of Rouge Moon is interesting, compelling and almost entirely sidelined to focus on characters who are neither of those things.
Something has been discovered on the moon. It’s a weird box. Maybe? Whatever it is, it needs to be investigated. Except, this book was published in 1960, before the moon landing, so how do we do that? Radio transmission that’s how.
“Just like that? No rockets, no countdowns? Just a bunch of tubes sputtering and squish! I’m on the Moon, like a three-D radiophoto.” Barker smiled. “Ain’t science great?”
Dr. Edward Hawks has developed a way to transmit living people via radio waves. A subject is scanned and broadcast to a relay that reconstitutes them at the other end. When the US government discovers the strange moon box, Hawks is ordered to use his technology to figure out what it is.
Hawks begins his investigation but there’s a problem; the moon box keeps killing people for what seems like completely arbitrary reasons.
It is, for example, fatal to kneel on one knee while facing lunar north. It is fatal to raise the left hand above shoulder height while in any position whatsoever. It is fatal past a certain point to wear armor whose air hoses loop over the shoulders. It is fatal past another point to wear armor whose air tanks feed directly into the suit without the use of hoses at all. It is crippling to wear armor whose dimensions vary greatly from the ones we are using now. It is fatal to use the hand motions required to write the English word yes/ with either the left or right hand.
However, the transmitter technology effectively makes two people, the scanned person on earth and the version transmitted to the moon. So, when the moon box kills the duplicate, you can scan the original and start again. Except there’s another problem, the moon box doesn’t allow any information to leave:
Non-living matter, such as a photograph or a corpse, can be passed out from inside. But the act of passing it out is invariably fatal to the man doing it. That photo of the first volunteer’s body cost another man’s life. The formation also does not permit electrical signals from its interior. That includes a man’s speaking intelligibly inside his helmet, loudly enough for his RT microphone to pick it up. Coughs, grunts, other non-informative mouth-noises, are permissible. An attempt to encode a message in this manner failed. You will not be able to maintain communication, either by broadcast or along a cable.
So, not only will the box kill you but there’s no way for anyone outside the box to know why it killed you. Except, while conducting some of their trials, Hawks realises that if the original subject is kept in a sensory deprivation tank, their mind syncs with their double on the moon. For a period, they act as one person, meaning the original experiences everything the double does, right up until the moment they die. This solves the problem of mapping the moon box but introduces the psychological problem of everyone the box kills remembering their own death.
This is the starting point of book and let me say right now, I love all of this. This is so interesting and there’s so many directions you can go with almost any aspect of it. I love the moon box, I love transmitting people via radio, and the trauma inherent to knowing you died. It’s good, it’s really good. the problem is it’s like 10% of the 173 pages of the book.
So, the book begins with Hawks needing a new subject to send to the moon, one who can deal with dying all the time. He speaks to Connington, the Stetson wearing, Cadillac driving head of HR, and he has the perfect man in mind: Al Barker. A fearless daredevil, Al Barker seems like the perfect man for the job. His main problem is that he’s a difficult man to like but ultimately that means he’s just like everyone else in this book.
I don’t care about any of the characters, and I don’t even think the book is trying to make me care. It feels like it’s focusing on characters to show it’s a real book, not just some sci-fi story. These are real, flawed people and they have complex relationships to each other. Except not really? The book tries to tell me that Barker is an unfeeling, ruthless scientist but it primarily does this by having other people tell me that. Al Barker is an arrogant daredevil who rubs people the wrong way but again, this is mainly conveyed by people saying he’s hard to work with. Connignton, the HR cowboy, is a character who doesn’t even need to exist, his primary purpose being connecting Barker and Hawks. Okay, that’s it. You can be done now.
Or, we can have him give a speech where he talks about how good a HR manager he is.
Connington laughed again, his high heels planted in the lawn. “Me, I’m personnel man. I don’t look cause and effect I don’t look heroes. Explain the world in a different way. People—that’s all I know. ‘S enough. I feel ’em. I know ’em. Like a chemist knows valences. Like a physicist knows particle charges. Positive, negative. Atomic weight, ‘tomic number. Attract, repel. I mix ’em. I compound ’em. I take people, an’ I find a job for them, the co-workers for ’em. I take a raw handful of people, and I mutate it, and make isotopes out of it—I make solvents, reagents—an I can make ‘splosives, too, when I want. That’s my world. Sometimes I save people up—save ’em for the right job to make ’em react the right way. Save ’em up for the right people. Barker, Hawks—you’re gonna be my masterpiece. ‘Cause sure as God made little green apples, he made you two to meet… An me, me, I found you, an’ I’ve done it, I’ve rammed you two together. … an’ now it’s done, an’ nothing’ ever take the critical mass apart, and sooner, later, it’s got to ‘splode, and who’re you gonna run to then, Claire?”
Claire is Barker’s girlfriend and she is Woman; a manipulative creature who is as mysterious and inexplicable as any moon box and spends all her time in a bikini lounging by the pool. It’s a Sci-Fi book from the 1960s, so I’m not expecting it to have good opinions on women, but there’s not all that much to Claire. She flirts with other men just to drive Barker wild! But she’ll never leave him because he’s the only man strong enough to tame her! Right, okay, can we get back to the moon box?
Well, not really? There’s a lot of interesting stuff bubbling under the surface of this book but nothing ever goes anywhere. We end the story not knowing much more about the mysterious box apart from how to cross from one side of it to the other but I’m fine with that. That all ties into the overall theme of the book that there’s no great answer that will solve it all, every advance creates new problems that once addressed will lead to yet more problems.
I’ve read plenty of Sci-Fi that was carried by its ideas and this could have been one if the ideas were the focus. Instead, the things I don’t care are explained in painful detail while the interesting stuff is glossed over in a monologue. In writing this blog, I’ve realised there was a lot of things I liked about the book yet when I was reading it I couldn’t wait for it to end. Like, look at this:
“I’ll take my own shirt off, sonny,” he rasped, and pulled it off over his head. As Sampson unbuckled the leg’s main strap, Barker looked twistedly at Hawks and ticked the edge of the armor shell with his fingers. “New artifices, Mage?” He seemed to be expecting some special response to this.
Hawks frowned. Barker’s grin became even more distorted with irony. He looked around him. “Well, that’s one flunk. Anybody else care to try? Maybe I should tie one hand behind my back, too?”
The ensign said uncertainly to Hawks, “It’s a quotation from a play, Doctor.” He looked at Barker, who solemnly wet a fingertip and described an X in the air.
“Score one for the NROTC graduate.” The other men in the dressing team kept their heads down and worked.
“What kind of a play, Ensign?” Hawks asked quietly.
“I read it in my English Lit course,” the ensign said uncomfortably, flushing as Barker winked. “Merlin the Magician has made an invincible suit of armor. He intended it for Sir Galahad, but as he was making it, the needs of the magic formula forced him to fit it to Lancelot’s proportions. And even though Lancelot has been betraying King Arthur, and they’ll be fighting in the joust that day, Merlin can’t let the armor just go unused. So he calls Lancelot into his workshop, and the first thing Lancelot says when he comes in and sees the magic armor is: What’s this—new artifices, Mage?”‘
Barker grinned briefly at the ensign and then at Hawks. “I hoped you’d recognize the parallel, Doctor. After all, you say you’ve read a book or two.”
Personally, I don’t think it’s a good enough parallel to warrant inclusion, but I can forgive it. What I can’t forgive is the fact it keeps going.
“I see,” Hawks said. He looked thoughtfully at Barker, then asked the ensign, “What’s Merlin’s reply?”
“‘Aye. Armorings.'”
Barker’s mouth hooked upward in glee. He said to Hawks,
“‘Armorings? Sooth, Philosopher, you’ve come to crafting in your tremblant years? You’ve put gnarled fingers to the metal-beater’s block, and hammered on Damascus plate to mime the armiger’s employe?'”
The ensign, looking uncertainly from Hawks to Barker, quoted:
“‘How I have done is no concern for you. . . . Content yourself that when an eagle bends to make his nest, such nests are built as only eagles may inhabit. —Or those who have an eagle’s leave.'”Barker cocked an eyebrow. “‘And I’ve your leave, old bird?'”
“‘Leave and prayer, headbreaker,'” the ensign replied to him.
“‘You like me not,'” Barker said, frowning at Hawks.
“‘And surely Arthur’d not command you to enwrap this body’s hale and heart beyond all mortal damage. Nay, not this body—he’s not fond of my health, eh?—Well, that’s an other matter. You say this armor comes from you? Then it is proof, weav’d up with your incantings? ‘Tis wondrous strong? For me? As I began, you like me not—why is this, then? Who has commanded you?'”The ensign licked his lips and looked anxiously at Hawks. “Should I go on, Doctor?”
He shouldn’t but he does. For two pages. I know it’s probably crazy to say a 173 book should be shorter but, while trying to find out what play this is, I found out that this book used to be shorter. In a review by Mark R. Kelly (no relation) for on BlackGate.com which suggests Budrys made it up and, even more chilling, it wasn’t in the original published version of the story. In fact, most of the stuff I found incredibly tedious seems to have been added to this expanded version. Take for example a brief excerpt from the several pages of description granted to Hawks going into a gas station.
He frowned and looked around at the doorframe behind him. He found a bell, suspended from the frame where the swung-back main door would have brushed it. It had been noiselessly cleared by the smaller screen door. He reached up and bent the bracket downward. His precise gesture failed to disturb the bell enough to ring it, and he stood looking at it, his expression clouded. He half reached toward the bell, brought his hand back down, and turned around again. A number of cars passed back and forth on the highway, in rapid succession.
This is wild to me. There’s a certain art to short stories that makes them difference from… well… longer ones. Like you cut out the chaff from Rouge Moon and it’s a really good short story. It’d have so much more momentum and the sci-fi aspects wouldn’t feel so underdeveloped cause we wouldn’t have so many scenes were we desperately wished it’d get back to the point. I get that you probably can’t add too much extra to the sci-fi plot, it being about the unknowable mystery and insignificance of man in the grand cosmic scale, but that is reason to pivot to including the cowboy HR manager master plan to steal a guy’s girlfriend.
Still, with all that said, there are some things I really liked from the book that I present to you in a bulleted list for some reason.
- As a partial counter the fact that the Moon Box doesn’t allow information to leave, the investigator is given a tablet tied to a cord. The idea being that, once the person dies, the tablet can be reeled back to check the investigator’s notes. This is great, this is how DnD players would tackle a mystery box and I love it.
- This section dealing with the Moon Box:
Perhaps it’s the alien equivalent of a discarded tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it lies across the trail to the beetle’s burrow? Does the beetle understand why it is harder to climb to the left or right, inside the can, than it is to follow a straight line.
- As any piece of technology can fail, Hawks has to take multiple scans of Baker before they send him to the moon. He explains it like this:
When Thomas Edison spoke into the horn of his sound reproducer, the vibration of his voice against a diaphragm moved a needle linked to that diaphragm, and scratched a variable line on the rotating wax cylinder. When he played it back, out came ‘Mary had a little lamb.’ But there Edison was stopped. If the needle came loose, or the wax had a flaw, or the drive to the cylinder varied, out came something else—an unintelligible hash of noise. There was nothing Edison could do about it. He had no way of knowing what part of a scratch was song, and what was noise.
After this he goes on to explain it again with photo negatives but no, stop that. “No way of knowing what part of a scratch was song, and what was noise” is such a good line. - In parts I feel were added in the rewrite, there’s a few scenes where Hawks is being pressured to get better results. It doesn’t really play into anything and it amount to nothing but there’s something very real about inventing a way to transit humans and then your boss is like “Yeah but you gotta make it cheaper. Can’t we just sell some of these computers? You surely don’t need all of them.”
- People who remember dying on the moon end up with a lot of psychological issues. When Hawks meets one of these he asks:
He sighed at last and asked Weston, “Can you do anything for him?”
This is so grim and I love it.
“Cure him,” Weston said confidently. “Electroshock treatments. They make him forget what happened to him in that place. He’ll be all right.” - The alternative title for this was THE DEATH MACHINE which is a great name because it can either refer to the Moon Box or the scanning process that creates people just to kill them. Don’t get me wrong, I bought the book because Rouge Moon is a good name (It didn’t have blurb) but that title should be given to a book about a moon wandering off or, at the very least, a moon that can do stealth attacks.
There was probably more but if I can’t recall it now then it doesn’t matter. What does matter is the thing about this book that made me immediately hostile to it. At the start of the book Hawks meets the researcher who will be shocked back into good health, he says this:
“An dark . . .” he said querulously, “an dark and nowhere starlights…” His voice trailed away suddenly into a mumble, but he still complained.
Now it’s not the fact that he said something querulously (Why is he so whiny about dying? Jeez.) but rather I read this and thought “Surely it’s ‘a dark’? Is this a reference to something?”. So I googled it I only found references to this book and a reference to this book made in a My Little Pony fanfic that was based on Finnegan’s Wake. I have no greater point to make about this, I just felt like I needed to include it.
Anyways, Rouge Moon. 2/7.
