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Luna: Moon Rising (Luna, 3) Hardcover – March 19, 2019
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A LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR SCIENCE FICTION
The continuing saga of the Five Dragons, Ian McDonald's fast-paced, intricately plotted space opera pitched as Game of Thrones meets The Expanse
A hundred years in the future, a war wages between the Five Dragons―five families that control the Moon’s leading industrial companies. Each clan does everything in their power to claw their way to the top of the food chain―marriages of convenience, corporate espionage, kidnapping, and mass assassinations.
Through ingenious political manipulation and sheer force of will, Lucas Cortas rises from the ashes of corporate defeat and seizes control of the Moon. The only person who can stop him is a brilliant lunar lawyer, his sister, Ariel.
Witness the Dragons' final battle for absolute sovereignty in Ian McDonald's heart-stopping finale to the Luna trilogy.
Luna
1. Luna: New Moon
2. Luna: Wolf Moon
3. Luna: Moon Rising
- Print length448 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTor Books
- Publication dateMarch 19, 2019
- Dimensions6.49 x 1.42 x 9.56 inches
- ISBN-100765391473
- ISBN-13978-0765391476
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But that isn't to say the books aren't without their flaws. There are definitely some things I would have liked tightened up. The primary one being the amount of reading between the lines that's needed to fully grasp these books. I happened to read this with buddies, who were wonderfully patient with me, and I like to think I would have understood better if my time wasn't so stretched and I could really sit down and pay attention, but the truth is you have to infer quite a bit of information from these books. I had to re-read things a few times to figure out what I was witnessing.
I'll be the first to tell you I'm really not that reader. I like books that make me think about life, current events, philosophy, religion you name it, but I'd prefer if the events of the book are pretty straight forward. This isn't something I detract a lot of points for, because readers deserve to have books that challenge them. (As an aside- another beloved series, Terra Ignota is written a lot like this. Maybe it's something I like more than I think I do.)
The second thing I would have changed is that, reading this, I felt like a lot of information was purposefully withheld from readers in the earlier books just to make them more suspenseful. That does annoy me. One example is Wagner and his "lycanthropy". It does finally get an explanation in this book but the explanation was so simple that the big reveal felt very anticlimactic.
Finally, there were some characters whose storylines I hadn't really invested in in books one and two because their storylines take awhile to get ramped up and they never really felt like the focus. Those storylines get some pretty thrilling conclusions in book three and I was cursing myself the whole time for not paying better attention to them. Likewise, I found myself missing some the characters who were more important players early on and sort of faded to the background here.
But in the end, these books are some of the most entertaining books I've ever read. The world building is solid, and it's never told in boring info dumps. It throws you head first into this dark, ugly world with little more than a short dictionary to guide you. The characters are whole and three dimensional, motivated by their own desires, with unique voices. They're colorful and vibrant and pop off the page. I adore the "heroes". I love the justice dispensed to the villains. I read the last 150 pages almost all in one sitting because the conclusion was so perfect, I couldn't look away for even a moment.
I'm sad it's over, but I'm excited to jump into another McDonald book knowing what he's capable of, and even more thrilled by the possibility of a new series to sink my teeth into. Perhaps most telling, is that I'm sincerely looking forward to re-reading them all when I have more time on my hands.
I've been reading McDonald for years and he's a brilliant, brilliant, writer. Just elegant, very evocative and descriptive writing. But he went overboard on lyrical descriptions here without really biting deep into much substance.
It took me most of a month to get through this book, because I read others in between. Not a good sign when I lag reading one of my favorite authors.
The starting legal gambit at the beginning of the book is as good an example as any. Pages and pages of descriptions of how Ariel, a major character, is dressing up and with what designer brands ("courtroom battles are at least half about style, Dahling!"). Followed by, at most, a page of humdrum courtroom argumentation.
Or, when Mao de Ferro, another major character, goes up in space to see the Russian dragon family. Took me a while to figure out that she wasn't describing what she was experiencing, she was only viewing a presentation by the Russians of their gambit, a future space elevator. Would have been easy to miss, amidst all the descriptions of how everyone is dressed. Wouldn't have been a big deal however, because it... never really shows up in the plotlines again. Kinda the same fate as the MacKenzie’s asteroid smelting, whose plot contribution gutters out without even a whimper. Or the, rather unclear Lunar bourse concept.
Or the part where a doomed suicide squad beats overwhelming odds because their side pulls off some trick. Missed what the trick had been, didn’t care by then.
Ditto Mr. Wolf. So much about his "wolfness" but never really gets around to telling us what it's really about. Or him actually doing anything with it, for that matter. Playing up lycanthropy in a Lunar setting could be brilliant. But it's kinda cheating in a “hard SF” novel if you never actually explain anything (Peter Watts's vampires in Blindsight are an example of how that can be pulled off).
Likewise the 4 elementals, air, water, carbon, data. Such a strong early dystopian anti-capitalist subtheme, then left for dead during 90% of the 3 books and dragged out of the closet at the very end. How do you ration someone's air in a space habitat shared by everyone? Yes, yes, you could if someone was in in her own spaceship and had to buy oxygen at times. But how do you do it in a city, without clamping a mask over their face, a plug in their nose or overriding their muscles?
How many times can you describe bossa nova, gin, fashion or sexual orientations before it gets a bit stale without a stronger plot? Not that there isn't a plot, it's just very complicated, infrequently glimpsed and repeatedly runs promising subthreads into dead ends (M Cazalghe's Earth subplot or the combat ghazi, anyone?). And what I mean by “characterization of sorts” is that these surface descriptions of things they like is often the main insight we get on their inner selves.
About the only thing I was happy about was Lucasinho being sidelined for most of the book since his chapters were always the most tedious.
I don't think the Luna series was badly written. Never. But it was a stylistic exercise which I would rather not see repeated in his next books.
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But overall this has been a very well-written and engaging series, and fully justifies 5 stars.
Ian McDonald is a supreme master of world building. Your brain tells you that you are reading fiction, that this moon society does not exist – at least not yet – but your emotions, everything in your reading consciousness, insists it is real – that McDonald is describing – not inventing – a world.
You cannot read this as a stand-alone – you need the background on the convoluted politics and the characters – dead, disowned and those (often miraculously) still alive and kicking.
The five ruling Families: Corta (Brazilian), Asamoah (Ghanaian), Taiyang (Chinese), Vorontsov (Russian) and Mackenzie (Australian) – continue to try and obliterate each other. But, there is a much more dangerous enemy on the horizon – one that may destroy lunar society, and its citizens forever.
There are characters you fall in love with – such as Lucasinho and Robson Corta – and those that you want sent to hell asap, such as the evil Bryce Mackenzie. The book focusses mainly on the Cortas, and that Family gains most of your sympathy, though the Asamoahs often seem like the only Family you could really trust.
The writing – as always – is sublime, melding words, phrases and belief systems from many world cultures, though predominantly those of the 5 Families. There is considerable gender and sexual fluidity on Luna, with neurodiversity as well (the wolf packs), and an extreme capitalisation of all human needs. There is no human right to air, water or food on Luna. Family always comes first – but whose family? And is that really the way to go?
Could this be a future human society?
There is light at the end of the tunnel – but so much darkness and violence on the way.
The themes are universal and very thought provoking. The trilogy would make an exceptional TV series – leaving ‘Game of Thrones’ in the dust (or more appropriately, the regolith).
Extremely highly recommended – and not just to SciFi fans. Enjoy!
This book rounds things off nicely and still has a couple of plot threads dangling. Hopefully there will be another one in the near future. In the meantime Amazon Prime are going to bring it to a small screen near you soon.
Do yourself a favour and read the books before it hits Prime. You won’t regret it….
Die "Luna"-Reihe hat mit diesem Buch einen guten Abschluss gefunden. Sie ist originell, die beschriebene Technologie fortgeschritten aber weit weg von Magie, und sie behandelt große menschliche Probleme. So muss SciFi sein! Ob CBS die Option zur Verfilmung ziehen wird, und ob die doch recht drastische Sexualität neben der Gewalt dort zu sehen sein wird, darf bezweifelt werden.






