Luna: Wolf Moon by Ian McDonald
Most reviews of Ian McDonald’s Luna: New Moon described it as: ‘Game of Thrones meets Dallas on the moon’. They were all bang on the money.
A hundred or so years from now, mining operations on our tidally-locked neighbour are bubbling along menacingly. Business is controlled by the ‘five dragons’ – ruthless mafia-like families with a vampire squid stranglehold on lunar life. The first installment of this Godfather-meets-Dune saga focused on an unemployed citizen’s stroke of luck. She fell in with the Brazilian Corta family as a jill-of-all-space-trades. It was a rapid rise from oxygen deprivation to the high life, and all just in time for a homicidal takeover by the (sickeningly familiar) Australian McKenzie family. The nastiness well and truly ended her dreams of bossa nova nights by the Sea of Tranquility.
McDonald’s follow up Wolf Moon traces the few surviving Cortas’ veangeful antics, the Sun family’s Art of War long game, and the Machiavellian side pursuits of the other dragons. It’s our ill-fated mining boom meets the Wolf of Wall Street on Ridley Scott’s Nostromo. Only the business is dirtier, the sex is crazier and the death count is far higher.
Welcome to paradise. Your oxygen bills are overdue.