t is a well-known fact that disaster novels kill forests. Their girth, in general, is great, and they sometimes sell by the million. The pulp mills thrive.
Jack McDevitt's Moonfall, which is his first attempt at the form, is pretty great in girth (nearly 500 substantial pages); and, if its excellence is rewarded, will sell a lot of copies.
None of this, however, addresses the obvious real question: Why on earth write one in the first place?
We will come back to this question.
It is 2024 in America. The domestication of near space has continued, though falteringly; the region that incorporates our home planet and its great Moon boasts labs and observatories and shuttles and ships galore; and there is a Moonbase with a shopping plaza. American politics are similar to today's (or rather to the politics of a few decades ago); American social life and mores are similarly described in terms which make one think not of 2024, or of 1998, but of 1950 as seen by the editors of Life.
But McDevitt is no fool. Very clearly, in the mise-en-scène of Moonfall, he has created a platform to tell a disaster novel in; he has not created an SF world (and clearly has not attempted to). Because a disaster novel is not about changing the world; it is about saving the world from a threat to the normalcy of things--that is, it is about saving a world which its readers look back on and regret the passing of. In a disaster novel, to defeat a threat is to regain the past.
The best disaster novels end in marriages.
(Moonfall, which is one of the best of them, certainly does.)
For the SF reader, then, there is little to note.
But for any reader willing to accept the rules of the game, a great deal of fun is to be had.
An odd light in the sky
As we've said, it's 2024. The Moon is in the middle of eclipsing the Sun. Lots of folk watch with interest, including one amateur astronomer who notices an odd light in the sky. It turns out to be a giant comet, travelling 10 times the speed that comets normally travel, and heading straight for the Moon, which it will almost certainly destroy on impact.
On the Moon, at this dramatic moment, we find the Vice President of the United States (given his flawed but hugely likable personality, his who-me charisma, and the heroic acts he is called on to perform, it is hugely hard not to think of Harrison Ford: no, not hugely hard: impossible), who is on the Moon to attend the ceremonious launch of a nuclear-powered ship to Mars.
On Earth, the President of the United States is given the bad comet news, and refuses to treat it with proper respect--which means, by the law of the disaster novel, that he's a goner. If the cancer he's suffering from doesn't get him, he'll die in the catastrophe to come (he dies in the catastrophe to come). Fatally, he attempts to soothe his nation and the world. Fatally, he gives folk to believe that the consequences on Earth of the destruction of the Moon will be minimal.
Those who do and those who die
The plot thickens, a process conveyed (as in all disaster novels) through a succession of short scenes whose point-of-view actors tend either to be supernumerary future victims of the catastrophe; or cynics destined to die (see above); or techno jocks doing what guys (and, in this novel, lots of gals) got to do under unendurable circumstances in order to save people and/or to perform the impossible tasks in order to save the world that they are asked to perform by the men and women who appear after the next semi-colon; or the men and women who understand the nature of the problem and must convince those in power to authorize a plan of action to combat the disaster that is not only daring and very very complicated but almost certainly impossible and likely to kill secondary characters by the dozen but it's our only chance.
First, the human population of the Moon must be evacuated. The Vice President has politicked himself into a position where he must stay at Moonbase until the last moment--and then found out that the evacuation is one ship short; he must be rescued, and is.
A pretty good joke
Next, the comet hits. The moon fragments. A vast fallout of debris raddles planet Earth. Where there are not direct hits (in one instance, space debris lands right on the head of one of the viewpoint supernumeraries: a joke, I thought, and a pretty good one), there are tsunamis, which cause enormous flooding, taking out (for instance) the whole of Los Angeles.
The President of the United States, himself raddled by guilt because he advised the American people to stay put along the seacoasts where so many of them dwell, is killed.
The new President of the United States undergoes a virtuoso succession of crises before becoming the best President of the United States we're ever going to get.
In the end, the world is saved. And there are marriages.
It is impossible to think Jack McDevitt was entirely serious about Moonfall; it is also impossible to think that he failed at any moment to give us everything he could. The planning of the tale is meticulous; the characters are likable when they should be; the pacing is pell-mell but orderly; and the tongue is in the cheek, where it belongs. Once you have begun Moonfall, you do not put the book down voluntarily before you finish--though you do put the book down often, because it is very heavy.
I think Jack McDevitt wrote the book to give us fun.
Moonfall is a triumph of a disaster.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and co-editor of both the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, as well as one of the co-founders of the British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Look at the Evidence, was nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award.
