The moon goddess and the son

Most of this book impressed me. By the standards of American sf, it's a superior piece of writing, set in the fairly near future, in the context of a continuing arms race which is becoming destabilised by developments on Earth and in space. It has plenty of good, distinctive characters of both sexes (more men than women, though). The author, although an academic mathematician by profession, seems well clued-up on space technology, and even has a new idea to propose (new to me, anyway). He's done a lot of research into Russian history and Marxism, and makes good use of it in an ambitious and atmospheric exploration of the Russian mentality and Russian society—for which he uses a memorably eccentric think-tank organisation.

He seems to have visited the Middle East. He's familiar with computers, and tips his hat in passing to sf fandom, rock and electronic music, and role-playing games.

However, for me the last part of the book (perhaps the last 50 or 100 pages) was disappointing. The plot fails to climax satisfactorily, its credibility deteriorates, and the tone seems to sour a little, as if the author is aging along with his characters (in fact he was 57 at the time of publication, older than I'd have guessed initially).

He seems to have an uneasy love/hate relationship with women. All male-female relationships in the book are troubled, and most of his main characters are suffering from personality defects or hangups of one sort or another. The teenage girl chasing after father figures, so popular in American films, reappears here; do American teenage girls really do this, or is it just a male fantasy?

He has the space bug badly enough to think that living on the Moon is an inherently desirable objective. Thus, when a few of his characters finally make it to an early lunar colony, they seem satisfied just to be there, and content to remain there for an indefinite period of time. However, he makes little attempt to disguise the fact that living in an early lunar colony would be rather like spending your life in a nuclear submarine.

Although I've always been in favour of the move into space, a lot would have to be done to the Moon before I'd contemplate permanent emigration.

In summary, this is an ambitious book that doesn't quite come off, by a man who can write very competently and has some interesting things to say, but isn't always convincing or likeable.

(Review written in 1987)