I also understand that this is a sidebar to a trilogy McDonald is writing set on the moon - actually, The Menace from Farside is a 2019 book, so I think that trilogy is complete now.
So that's two sets of references: to a sixty-year-old story by someone else, relatively famous and well-known, and to a recent trilogy by the same author. I haven't read the trilogy yet, and haven't read the Heinlein story for years, so I'll be vague about those references. But I can at least signpost them here.
Like the Heinlein story, Farside is told in first person by a young Lunarian, unhappy with a flashy, exciting rival who has just barged into her life. In Farside, that's Cariad Corcoran, and the interloper is Sidibe Sisay. Cariad's mother Laine and Sidibe's father Gebre are part of a ring marriage - just what it sounds like, with everyone having two equal partners, one to each "side," on and on around in a circle until it connects back up, a chain of throuples with presumably all the drama that implies - and that ring is in the middle of a major adjustment, with Gebre coming in to Laine's "right" to replace the previous husband. [1]
Cariad is unhappy, but the marriage is fast-approaching. Mostly because of that - she doesn't seem to be trying to stop the marriage, or to get Sidibe sent back to outer darkness Farside, but her preferred endgame is unclear - Cariad hatches a plan for those two, and their two closest sibs (Jair and Kobe, both living in Laine's household for complex reasons) to make an epic trek across the Moon, ostensibly for a wedding present.
Cariad wants to go the the Apollo 11 landing site, take a picture of the four of them at the "first footprint," and present that as their present. To do that, they need to secretly get suits and supplies, use unapproved access to get transportation, and sneak away before the adults notice. After the necessary planning, they do so.
The trip has dangers and upsets and surprises, as it must. But they reach the landing site - finding it not quite as pristine as they had hoped - and start back, more or less on schedule. Then everything goes to hell, as Cariad tells us on the first page.
This is a novella, so it's entirely focused on the trip: it starts with Cariad meeting Sidibe, runs through the preparation, and then mostly the actual journey. Cariad is telling this story to someone, so we know, from the beginning, that she survives.
I think McDonald stuck pretty closely to the Heinlein plot in its larger structure - the story beats rather than the who-did-what moments - which is fun to see and trace. It's less specifically about romantic rivals than the Heinlein, though Cariad does admit to a bit of that. And it's a voice-driven story, like a lot of the best of Heinlein: McDonald creates a believable, quirky, specific young woman to tell us about this journey, and Cariad is a lot of fun to spend a hundred and fifty pages with. I've always been on Team SF Is Best at Novella Form, and this is a nice brick to continue building the wall of that argument.
[1] It's sort-of implied that everyone has to be bisexual for this work, since one link is same-sex and one link is opposite-sex, but maybe that's just this chain. Frankly, an all-same-sex ring would more likely be stable, so there may be some of those lurking in the background. The other option is that this is much more of a dynastic marriage than a romantic one, and that sex is secondary at best - it's also implied that a ring marriage is basically a corporation, with business interests and specific expertise. Either way, Cariad, as a tween, has roughly zero insight into the actual sources of the drama in her mother's ring.
No comments:
Post a Comment