• Rating:
Like everyone, I am curious about the film by Damien Chazelle and starring Ryan Gosling, focused on the figure of the greatest hero in our history, Neil Armstrong. The moon landing was the pinnacle of human history, where timeless dreams materialized, and science surpassed all superstition and even science fiction, with humans crossing the last (so far) known frontier. This has enshrined Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins in history and somehow also in epic, although those two things should be considered separately, simply because today those conspiracy theories that sometimes intrigue us with their strangeness and other times just make us laugh, have become massive and a justification for a dangerous form of obscurantism. So this film is welcome; we'll evaluate its aspects and contents later, but focusing on Armstrong's human figure instead of the feat itself is positive because it narrates facts rather than relying on spectacularization. In the case of this relatively copious novel by Ian McDonald titled "Luna: New Moon," we return to the Moon in a purely science fiction context where our satellite has eventually become a terrain of conquest and colonization by humans under environmental, structural, and social conditions reconstructed in a hypothetical and dystopian manner—rightfully science fiction, but not for this reason extremely implausible, essentially based on already known scientific subjects or in any case the object of speculation and research.
The context is the reconstruction of facts that see our satellite being colonized for three generations starting from the one following ours (we are in 2110) and in a phase where, despite the difficulties in settlement and the persistent peculiar and difficult living conditions, the "currency of exchange" is practically water, carbon, air, and data. However, it seems from the reconstruction of facts and from the words of the protagonists of the story that things on the old Earth are not going much better, but only a few choose to cut the umbilical cord with the mother planet: going to the Moon is not so simple, and the prospect of leaving the planet is generally considered only by those who combine necessity with courage and ambition. Everyone who departs knows that they will most likely never return, and after a certain amount of time spent on the satellite for physical reasons, it becomes practically impossible.
It was reasons of necessity and ambition that drove Adriana Corta to leave her native land and Brazil for the Moon: a life choice that changed her destiny, the power balances on the Moon, and subsequently the economic ones of the entire planet Earth. Leaving Earth without a penny, Adriana had the intuition to see helium-3 as the future energy source. Thus, she became the main extractor, and "Corta Helio" was born. Earth depends on her company for energy resources as it always has from the Moon for metals, ice, and carbon, and at the time of the events narrated, the Cortas are one of the five "dragons," the five families that, starting with the Mackenzies, hold absolute economic power over the satellite. But among them, the Cortas, historic rivals of the Mackenzies, are not well-liked by everyone, and a dark plot endangers the dynasty built with ingenuity and dedication by Adriana Corta.
In truth, the first volume of a trilogy, the novel in Italy was published by this new Urania "Jumbo" series, which already proposed in the past but now relaunches the publication of great science fiction novels previously unpublished in Italy with four annual publications. The next chapters of the trilogy should be published shortly in the same series. Regarding the contents of this first novel, I do not think I will discourage the reader if I say that the story is not completed here; the ending clearly opens to a sequel, but for this reason, I would not be discouraged from reading a family saga halfway between "The Godfather," old westerns of yore, and clearly science fiction, which is abundant here in both the "Fanta" components but also science, in a characterization of lunar society that is very advanced scientifically and technologically while very particular on the social level, where novelties linked to the changes in customs and the same technology are mixed, but also old and new superstitions.
Loading comments slowly
