Customer Reviews

Lunar Activity

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A collection of short stories by Moon (the "lunar" in the title). This includes a story in the Paksennarion "universe", and runs from Fantasy to Science Fiction. If you love Elizabeth Moon's writing the way I do, you'll love this additional "activity."

This is an excellent book of short stories: however the subsequently published book "Phases" contains all the stories in this one, plus a few more. Go straight for the second book and don't bother with this one.

Eight of the 10 stories herein were included in Moon's newer short story collection PHASES (the missing pair being "Gravesite Revisited" and "If Nudity Offends You"). All except "Those Who Walk in Darkness" were previously published in either ANALOG or THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION.

PHASES also includes seven stories not in LUNAR ACTIVITY, and replaces the author's notes for the stories taken from LUNAR ACTIVITY with new notes, as the LUNAR ACTIVITY notes all tie in with its own introduction.

"Real Weather, Small Towns, and Science Fiction" (although listed in the table of contents simply as "Introduction") - "Far from such a planned environment [as that implied in a space habitat], this terrestrial Moon lives in a small town brimful of real weather...More than that, the mind has its own weather." The introduction doesn't discuss how the stories came to be written, but does set up the weather conceit used to link the stories together by way of the accompanying author's notes (which sometimes mention where the ideas came from and how the stories first came to be published).

"ABCs in Zero G" - For a paramedic on a space station construction project, even ABC - airway, breathing, circulation - isn't simple, with spacesuits designed without considering how to get an incapacitated wearer *out* of one in a hurry, and EVA traffic control handled by a computer. Very realistic take on what can happen when equipment is designed by people who haven't tested it under extreme field conditions, without any implausible foolishness (the experts have *their* good reasons for designing things too).

"A Delicate Adjustment" - In a future where improved birth control and UN resolutions blocking adoption of underprivileged children make life very hard on infertile parents, there's an underground trade in embryos salvaged from genetic research (which are supposed to have been "adjusted" so that they couldn't develop if implanted). Various good bits of snoopy bureaucracy, fighting over research grants, even a murder investigation.

"The Generic Rejuvenation of Milo Ardry" - "Milo, I know you're bright...[b]ut you always hated to study hard enough to learn anything. And what it sounds like now is that you haven't the faintest idea how a rejuvenation works, despite having undergone three of them and signed papers each time that said you did."

"Gravesite Revisited" wasn't included in PHASES - a pity, since it's one of the best stories in here. An ancient tribe, finding their graves robbed not once but twice in a day and a night, come up with a way to fool the witches who seek their grave goods. (The archaeologists in this one don't sound like competent anthropologists, with their assumption that a culture without advanced technology implies people who can't think.)

"Gut Feelings" - Timid Leonard Sanders, with a long family history of colon cancer, is finally beginning to start living now that his experimental crabworms - symbiotes that clean out forming cancers - have worked out. Then the animal rights activists decide to weigh in, and Leonard opts to cut and run rather than wait for the courts to fight it out. Nice bit of life under a microscope, as he fetches up at a tiny shopping center with a lot of very independent tenants.

"If Nudity Offends You" (not included in PHASES) "...please do not ring this bell." And that's only the most obvious oddity about the neighbours across the trailer park who made the mistake of stealing Louanne's electricity...

"Just Another Day at the Weather Service" - or rather, for the man at their extension to who answers as UFO Clearinghouse, whenever anyone wants to know if what they saw was a weather balloon.

"New World Symphony" - Every exploration team in the Union includes artists and musicians, and Georges Mantenon is the composer assigned to interpret the mining world currently being surveyed by the _Congarsin_ into music. But what can you do when your first reaction is to summarize the experience with a single loud crunching noise?

"Those Who Walk in Darkness" - An outtake from OATH OF GOLD (volume 3 of THE DEED OF PAKSENARRION) - what happened to one of the children who witnessed the thieves guild's torture of a paladin late in the story.

"Too Wet to Plow" - "It took the Corps of Engineers fifty years to tame the Mississippi, and it took the Mississippi five terrible years of death and destruction to destroy the Corps of Engineers." But those who still farm what's left of the Mississippi floodplain are stubborn enough to hang on, even if they have to use moorings to do it.