Rogue Moon
Algis Budrys
176 pages
published in 1960
Rogue Moon was a book that confounded my expectations. Because so many people over at rec.arts.sf.written had mentioned this book as one of the classics everyone should've read, I snapped it up when I saw it in one of the local secondhand bookstores. Now what I expect from a vintage science fiction novel like Rogue Moon is something in which the main appeal will be the ideas presented in it. I also expected a simple plot and characters which were not so much drawn as sketched.
This turned out to not be the case. Rogue Moon can in fact be described just as well as a psychological thriller as a science fiction novel. The heart of the story lies more in the relationships between the main characters as it does in the scientific enigma that they're researching.
Rogue Moon is set in 1959 (ie when the book was being written) and something alien has been found on the Moon. At the time of course the US was still way behind the USSR in rocket technology, but this doesn't matter because Continential Electronics has managed to build a working matter transmitter. Edward Hawks is the inventor of this transmitter and now head of the project to study this alien artifact, the exploration of which has cost the lifes or sanity of several brave young men... A different breed of explorer is needed, a man who doesn't fear death, but courts her: a man like Al Barker.
Al Barker is the Adventurer, the man of action courting death, while Edward Hawks is the Scientist, the rational man calmly sending others to their fate. Material enough for conflict, especially since there's also Barker's woman Claire egging Barker on, not to mention Connington, who introduced Hawks and Barker to each other and who delights in stoking the fires of their conflict.
As said above, Budrys focuses less on the alien artifact, whose nature is only revealed roughly halfway the book as he does on the nature of Hawks and Barker and what lies behind the cliches of Scientist and Adventurer. This is unusual in a science fiction novel, especially in one written before the New Wave hit the genre. Recommended.
