- Baxter, Stephen.
Moonseed.
New York: Harper Voyager, 1998.
ISBN 978-0-06-105903-2.
-
Stephen Baxter is one of the preeminent current practitioners of
“hard” science fiction—trying to tell a tale
of wonder while getting the details right, or at least plausible.
In this novel, a complacent Earth plodding along and seeing its
great era of space exploration recede into the past is stunned
when, without any warning, Venus explodes, showering the
Earth with radiation which seems indicative of processes at
grand unification and/or superstring energies. “Venus
ponchos” become not just a fashion accessory but a necessity
for survival, and Venus shelters an essential addition to basements
worldwide.
NASA geologist Henry Meacher, his lunar landing probe having been
cancelled due to budget instability, finds himself in Edinburgh,
Scotland, part of a project to analyse a sample of what may be
lunar bedrock collected from the last Apollo lunar landing
mission decades before. To his horror, he discovers that what
happened to Venus may have been catalysed by something in the Moon
rock, and that it has escaped and begun to propagate in the ancient
volcanic vents around Edinburgh. Realising that this is a potential
end-of-the-world scenario, he tries to awaken the world to the
risk, working through his ex-wife, a NASA astronaut, and argues
the answer to the mystery must be sought where it originated,
on the Moon.
This is grand scale science fiction—although the main narrative
spans only a few years, its consequences stretch decades
thereafter and perhaps to eternity. There are layers and layers
of deep mystery, and ambiguities which may never be resolved. There
are some goofs and quibbles big enough to run a dinosaur-killer
impactor through (I'm talking about “harenodynamics”: you'll
know what I mean when you get there, but there are others), but still
the story works, and I was always eager to pick it back up
and find out what happens next. This is the final volume in Baxter's
NASA
trilogy. I found the first two novels,
Voyage and
Titan (December 2012), better overall,
but if you enjoyed them, you'll almost certainly like this book.
June 2013 