They are known as the Five Dragons: the Asamoahs, the Cortas, the Mackenzies, the Suns and the Vorontsovs. Out on this new frontier, five families dominate the farming of the moon’s resources. Drink, drugs, kink, violence – if you can think it, you can do it. Your identity and sexuality are whatever you say they are, for as long as you say they are. This is the most permissive society humanity has yet known. The third and last rule is that anything goes. In a society in which everything can be negotiated death is the ultimate decider. It is a place of performance, but also one in which trial-by-combat is countenanced. The Court of Clavius is the place to go to contest or thrash out a contract, but only if you can afford a lawyer.
There are contracts, everything is negotiable and it’s all business.
You have no rights and there is no law and, thus, no crime.
The moon is an “offshore industrial outpost”. The second rule is that you are not a citizen of the moon, you are a client, as is everyone else. I say briefly because of the stark contrast between the Fleet’s barter and cooperation precepts and this moon’s principles of purchase and competition). (This closed-loop system made me think briefly of Becky Chambers’ Record of a Spaceborn Few. When your clothes are dirty they are recycled.
If you don’t have work, you don’t have money to pay for these things, and they will be denied you. Your lunar life will be ruled by the Four Elementals: oxygen, water, carbon and data. The first rule is that the Lunar Development Corporation, the LDC, owns all organic matter. Everything about McDonald’s industrial lunar society in this trilogy is fascinating, his characters often larger than life, and after a slow start in which I struggled to get my bearings, acquaint myself with the large company of characters and catch onto the multilingual borrowings strewn liberally throughout, I tore through the rest of these books as though my life depended on it. Set in the most hostile of environments and peopled with a vicious and ambitious cast, these first two volumes took me completely by surprise. I am going to talk here about the first two books New Moon and Wolf Moon because to my mind they form a natural pair, and then I’ll follow up this post with a second one in which I talk about Luna: Moon Rising which is a different beast, about which I have different things to say. I read the three books that currently comprise McDonald’s Luna series back to back over an intense couple of weeks. Artwork by Tithi Luadthong from quote from Seven Devils by Elizabeth May & Laura Lam.
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