A head flies into bloody smash the banners of Dona Luna fall, one by one. A shell-suit splinters into flying shards. A figure in a sasuit twists and goes down. The fight that follows is a preview of events that fill the rest of the book: lightning fast, relentless, and merciless, even when there is nothing to be gained except the destruction of enemies.Ī body falls. The book opens ten days after the catastrophic end of the previous volume, with the party taking nine-year-old Luna Corta and the all-but-lifeless body of her teenage brother Lucasinho to safety facing a paramilitary force sent by the rival Mackenzie clan, who are in turn surrounded by Corta loyalists. Now those destructive feuds and disruptions have given the Earthly powers of the LMA (the Lunar Mandate Authority) an opening to assert themselves in ways that threaten the independence of lunar life, while the remaining Dragons look at new, game-changing enterprises of their own. Surviving heir Lucas Corta has been to Earth and back (a trip that nearly killed him) and has managed to become the Eagle – the nominal executive figure – of the Moon. Mackenzie Metals took down and absorbed the Corta Hélio helium-mining business, and the Cortas struck back savagely. The first two volumes followed the combination of business rivalries and blood feuds that pitted the family-based Dragons – the dominant industrial organizations that exploit lunar resources – against each other. (We will return to this notion later in the column.) Even if McDonald does decide to stop here, the Luna triptych will remain a wild ride through a world that is simultaneously familiar and unsettlingly new, and one of the most compelling SF creations of recent years. On the other hand, this capacious, busy, fictional story space could be extended indefinitely to follow humankind (if not this particular set of characters) into a strange, wonderful, and scary future history.

If Ian McDonald’s Luna sequence is a trilogy (or, as I see it, a single triple-decker novel), then Luna: Moon Rising is the final volume, since it completes the large-cast, multi-threaded, braided story arc that began with Luna: New Moon (2015) and continued in Luna: Wolf Moon (2017).

New Moon by Ian McDonald