Red Moon - Kim Stanley Robinson

**** Unexpectedly engaging

I decided to read this book because I needed to immerse myself in the lunar atmosphere while writing my current WIP (work in progress) and I must admit that, after the experience with “Red Mars” and “Green Mars” (I have yet to read the third book in the trilogy) I was afraid of being thrown into a scientific-political-psychological treatise, studded with short stories of different characters. Instead, I was positively surprised to realise that this novel had only a few characters and only followed their stories.

Of course, Robinson can’t help but stuff his writing of information, especially on political matters, but the fact that the perspective of the narrative originated mostly from Chinese characters (hence the “red” of the title) caught my attention.

“Red Moon” is a book that tries to imagine the political evolution, linked to the technological one, of China in the near future, and it does so through a small number of characters with different characteristics, well shown to the reader, with whom it is easy to immediately feel close. This makes the reading flow quickly, due to the way in which the narrated events follow each other without pause and also thanks to the non-excessive length of the novel.

Actually, the Moon does not occupy the whole story. A good part of it takes place in China, a China of the future that is shown to us in an effective and engaging way. Yet the Moon is at the centre of everything.

The technological part is as always very accurate and characterised by a remarkable plausibility, able to push the reader’s mind to see the events as a future that will be become real in due course.

Personally I appreciated the choice of the author to show some places of the Moon, such as the base at the south pole, the one in the libration zone and the settlement inside a crater, both for what regards the real landscapes, recreated perfectly in my mind from his beautiful evocative prose, and for his imaginative ability in proposing what humanity will build in those places.

Everything is favoured by a smooth reading, in the good meaning of the term, that is to say that, even through a language that is anything but simple and banal, the desire to know what would happen later pushed me to go on and the beauty of Robinson’s prose made things easier.

Red Moon on Amazon.