Throughout the narrative, there are a litany of casual asides noting the scars of unrestrained capitalism. Yet the Moon is now beginning to show troublingly familiar signs of its own industrial development. Reversing the usual colonial relations, terrestrial civilization is little more than a hollowed out pseudo-imperial core, desperately dependent on the vast migration of surplus workers to the libertarian-imperial satellite and the new post-oil energy that it produces. In the shadow of its economically developing moon with an enviable socially liberal culture, the Earth appears like a relic, ravaged by climate change, pandemics, and energy insecurity. However, the Luna trilogy stands out as the most attuned to our precarious age by yoking the libertarian moonbase narrative of yesteryear to the issues that pervade our present and strangle our future: debt, finance, AI-assisted surveillance capitalism, anthropogenic climate change, and energy futures. Moon colonization narratives seem to be in vogue again, with Kim Stanley Robinson ( Red Moon), Andy Weir ( Artemis), and John Kessel ( The Moon and the Other) recently adding their spins to the subgenre. So, to that end, before going any further, I should note that Moon Rising shouldn’t and really can’t be read as a stand-alone novel, and I’ll make no effort to avoid spoilers from the previous installments. Previous series have either gone unfinished (Chaga and Everness) or weren’t really series at all, so much as narratives set in the same world ( Desolation Road and Ares Express).

Completing a tightly plotted series like this is a surprisingly new accomplishment for an SF writer who has been working as long as McDonald.

WITH LUNA: MOON RISING, Ian McDonald brings his lunar colonization trilogy to a close.

Time Was by Ian McDonald