MOON

   The lunar voyage has a long literary history, having developed from a standard framework for social SATIRE to become one of the archetypal projects of speculative fiction. Major works in the former tradition include two 2nd-century tales by LUCIAN of Samosata, Francis GODWIN's The Man in the Moone (1638), the first part of CYRANO DE BERGERAC's L'autremonde (1657), Daniel DEFOE's The Consolidator (1705), Samuel Brunt's A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727), Murtagh MCDERMOT's A Trip to the Moon(1728) and Joseph ATTERLEY's A Voyage to the Moon (1827). This phase of the history of the lunar voyage is the subject of Marjorie Hope NICOLSON's excellent Voyages to the Moon (1948), which has an extensive annotated bibliography. Several pre-1841 lunar voyages can be found in The Man in the Moone (anth 1971) ed Faith K. Pizor and T. Allan Comp. The use of the Moon as a stage for the erection of mock societies became less fashionablein the 19th century, but echoes of the tradition recur even in the present century, as in Compton MACKENZIE's The Lunatic Republic (1959). The first trip to the Moon seemingly motivated solely by the spirit of adventure was in a brief episode in Ralph MORRIS's ROBINSONADE The Life and Wonderful Adventures of John Daniel (1751).The idea that travelling to the Moonmight be a notion worth taking seriously first crops up in the appendix to John WILKINS's The Discovery of a New World (3rd edn 1640), where theauthor suggests that a man might be carried to the Moon by a large bird or that a flying machine capable of the trip might one day become practicable. Another writer to take seriously the modes of TRANSPORTATION used as conveniences by satirists was David RUSSEN, author of Iter Lunare (1703): he suggested that a man might be propelled to the Moon by theforce of a gargantuan spring. The first writer to make any pretence at verisimilitude was Edgar Allan POE, whose "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835) is a curious admixture of comic satire andspeculative fiction, although Pfaall's BALLOON seems hardly more credible than Russen's spring. A superficially more convincing method was the space-gun envisaged by Jules VERNE in De la terre a la lune (1865; trans J.K. Hoyte as From the Earth to the Moon 1869 US) and its sequel, Autourde la lune (1870; both trans Lewis Mercier and Eleanor King as From the Earth to the Moon . . ., and a Trip Around It 1873 UK).Serious interest inthe Moon as a world in its own right, possibly harbouring ALIEN life of its own, began with Johannes KEPLER's Somnium (1634), but this work stands almost alone. Richard Adams LOCKE published his "Moon Hoax" in the New York Sun in 1835, purporting to describe the inhabitants of the Moon asobserved by Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) with the aid of a new telescope, but this vision of lunar life was a gaudy burlesque. By the time the cosmic voyage began to be taken seriously in the 19th century the possibility of there being life on the Moon was already past credibility. H.G. WELLS imagined a Selenite society within the Moon in THE FIRST MEN INTHE MOON (1901), but the setting here was no more than a convenient literary device, like the antigravitic Cavorite by means of which the trip was accomplished. Other contemporary works - including W.S. LACH-SZYRMA's "Letters from the Planets" (1887-93), Edgar FAWCETT's The Ghost of GuyThyrle (1895) and George GRIFFITH's A Honeymoon in Space (1901)-portray the Moon as a place of ultimate desolation where life is extinct, although the scenes in which interplanetary voyagers find the ruins of long-dead civilizations on the Moon exhibit a curiously nostalgic sense of tragedy. A dead Moon is featured also in Andre LAURIE's Les exiles de la Terre(1887; trans as The Conquest of the Moon 1889 UK), a story made memorable by the magnificent notion that traversing the vacuum of space might be avoided if the Moon could be temporarily attracted into the Earth's atmosphere by giant magnets. Lunar life reappeared, however-sometimes in extravagant fashion - in the works of PULP-MAGAZINE writers, notably in Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's The Moon Maid (1923-5; fixup 1926), EdmondHAMILTON's "The Other Side of the Moon" (1929), Otis Adelbert KLINE's Maza of the Moon (1930) and, most impressively, Jack WILLIAMSON's "The Moon Era" (1932). Lip-service is paid to the deadness of the Moon's visiblesurface by locating the aliens inside the Moon, as Wells did, or only on its far side, or in the distant past. A nostalgic elegy for lunar life is offered by Lester DEL REY's "The Wings of Night" (1942).Dead or not, though, the Moon was there - a mere quarter of a million miles away - to be reached and to be claimed. To the early pulp writers this was an article of faith, so easily taken for granted that the Moon routinely became a mere stepping-stone en route to MARS or the STARS. The lunar voyage remained a constant theme of sf of the 1930s and 1940s, but it was more peripheral than the hype surrounding the first actual Moon landing (1969) suggested. The imminent possibility of SPACE FLIGHT in a real NEARFUTURE had been taken seriously by relatively few writers. Arthur C. CLARKE's essay, "We Can Rocket to the Moon - Now!" (1939), ushered in a new era of realism, but it was the advent towards the end of WWII of the V-2 rocket-bomb that hammered home the message that ROCKET-poweredSPACESHIPS were just around the corner. The post-WWII years saw publication of a number of visionary novels which elevated the first trip to the Moon to quasimythical status. Robert A. HEINLEIN, who had earlier written the poignant "Requiem" (1940) about the burning ambition of a man who longed to go to the Moon even though the trip would kill him, wrote a short novel about the same hero's earlier fight to finance the first Moon-shot and sell the myth of space conquest to the world: "The Man whoSold the Moon" (1950). Heinlein also scripted the George PAL film DESTINATION MOON (1950), drawing material from his first juvenile novel, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947). Heinlein wrote realistic sf stories set on the Moon for non-genre magazines, as did Arthur C. Clarke, the chief UK prophet and propagandist of space travel, and author of Prelude to Space (1951) and Earthlight (1951). Realistic juvenile novels concerning theestablishment of Moon bases were written by Lester DEL REY and Patrick MOORE, and the UK RADIO serial Journey into Space (novelized by CharlesCHILTON as Journey into Space * (1954)) further popularized the idea. Pierre BOULLE moved the myth decisively into MAINSTREAM fiction in Garden on the Moon (1964; trans 1965), but by then most sf writers had abandoned the theme as too commonplace. William F. TEMPLE's Shoot at the Moon (1966) was one of the last major celebrations of the lunar-voyage myth in sf before Neil Armstrong took his "one small step".In the mythology of sf, the first lunar landing was usually a prelude to rapid COLONIZATION. A lunar colony had waged its carbon-copy war of independence as long ago as The Birth of a New Republic (1931 AMZ Quarterly; 1981) by Jack Williamsonand Miles J. BREUER. The hostility of the lunar environment was admitted, but faith in human ingenuity ran high-John W. CAMPBELL Jr wrote the ultimate lunar robinsonade in The Moon is Hell (1950), easily outdoing Charles Eric MAINE's more modest High Vacuum (1956). Thrillers andmysteries set on the inhabited Moon became commonplace in the 1950s; examples are Murray LEINSTER's City on the Moon (1957), Clarke's A Fall of Moondust (1961) and Clifford D. SIMAK's Trouble with Tycho (1961).Heinlein produced a definitive new version of the birth of the new republic in THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS (1966), a vision which John VARLEY modified and expanded upon in Steel Beach (1992).Despite itsdeadness, the Moon retained its status as an alien world, and human visitors sometimes found echoes of others long passed on - artefacts left behind to confront the Earthlings, as they broke out of their atmospheric shell, with a glimpse of the infinite possibilities of an inhabited Universe. Clarke's "Sentinel of Eternity" (1951; vt "The Sentinel")captured the essence of this notion and became its archetypal expression, ultimately forming the seed of the film 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1967). An equally challenging but far less hospitable artefact is featured in ROGUE MOON (1960) by Algis BUDRYS, and the discovery of an apparently humancorpse on the Moon in James P. HOGAN's Inherit the Stars (1977) is a prelude to far more spectacular discoveries.Post-1969 sf tends to look farther out than the Moon, although lunar colonies are still a frequent feature of HARD-SF stories. Despite a deflection of attention towards orbiting SPACE HABITATS, Moon-based thrillers and mysteries are still produced. Notable examples are Larry NIVEN's The Patchwork Girl (1980), Roger MacBride ALLEN's Farside Cannon (1988), Michael SWANWICK's Griffin'sEgg (1991) and Charles L. HARNESS's Lunar Justice (1991). Moon colonies occasionally survive the devastation of Earth, as in When the Sky Burned (1973; exp vt Test of Fire 1982) by Ben BOVA. More spectacular use of theMoon is made by Bob SHAW in The Ceres Solution (1981), where it is broken up, and by John GRIBBIN and Marcus CHOWN in Double Planet (1988) and its sequel Reunion (1991), where it is supplied with a brand new atmosphere.A theme anthology is Men on the Moon (anth 1958) ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM.

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