ince watching the first lunar landing when he was 13, Dr. Kyle Gustafson has dreamed of going to the moon. That dream seems as remote as ever when Kyle, now the presidential science advisor, stands broiling under the Cape Canaveral sun, watching one of the first space shuttle launches since the Columbia disaster. When the shuttle Atlantis explodes, all dreams of space—not only Kyle's—seem dead. Then an enormous spaceship appears in lunar orbit, and an alien ambassador offers Earth membership in the Galactic Commonwealth ... if Earth proves worthy.
As Ambassador H'ffl of the F'thk race meets with the leaders of Earth, Kyle heads America's clandestine investigation into the technology and intentions of the friendly yet secretive aliens. However, any secrets Kyle's team might uncover may prove useless. For Earth isn't confirming its worthiness for Galactic Commonwealth membership. Instead, in a horrible irony, fear of the aliens has reawakened the Cold War, and escalating tensions among the world's governments are rising to a hot war that may turn Earth into a lifeless, radioactive desert.
As Earth's hopes of survival dim, Kyle is confronted by a triply limbed alien that bears no resemblance to the centaurlike F'thk. This strange alien claims the F'thk are not what they appear and have a sinister hidden agenda. But who can Kyle—and humankind—trust? The F'thk? The renegade alien? Neither? The future of Earth has never seemed shorter. ...
A love story only SF could tell
In his novel Moonstruck, physicist Edward M. Lerner operates proudly in the classic hard-SF tradition of John W. Campbell and Robert A. Heinlein. Lerner's science is rigorously extrapolated, never sacrificing plausibility for dramatic effect. SF fans weary of tech-moronic Hollywood movies will find much to enjoy and admire in Moonstruck's hard-SF evocation of what might really happen if Earth made first contact with an alien intelligence.
However, there's a reason Hollywood sacrifices techno-truth to drama. Real science, realistically presented, doesn't always lend itself to drama. It's plausible that the president's science advisor can't go on the secret space shuttle mission he's involved with. It's also unexciting. As Kyle watches the shuttle mission from Earth, dramatic tension diminishes, and so does identification with the protagonist. Readers want to see the hero personally acting on events to change them.
Reader excitement is further reduced by narrative decisions not necessitated by science. When the Galactic Commonwealth announces its arrival by pre-empting a TV broadcast, Kyle is stuck in traffic with his radio off—history's most significant inter-cultural event is experienced second-hand by the hero and third-hand by the reader. When Kyle and a few others investigate the secret behind the alien nanotechnology, their critical discovery occurs offstage—and readers never learn which character made the discovery. At the climax, quick jump-cuts among viewpoints disrupt tension and comprehension, instead of bringing the excitement to its peak. And then there's the avoidance of that messy, illogical matter of biology: emotion. Moonstruck shows little of its characters' feelings; Kyle's romance and marriage generate no heat, pushing readers further from narrative excitement. Still, one passion does burn through, and that's Kyle's—and Lerner's—desire for humankind to return to the moon, and the universe.
