The Moon Is Hell!

John W. Campbell, Jr.: The Moon Is Hell! (Gateway Essentials, 2011).

This novel (probably more a novella by "modern" standards) is usually found in an anthology with another Campbell story, The Elder Gods (for details, see this Wikipedia entry). This edition is an eBook from Gateway Essentials, a low-priced set of eBooks from the larger Gollancz line.

The story details an expedition to the Moon. Not the first (which was to the lunar nearside), but the second, to the farside of the Moon, in order to claim it for the United States of America. A sizable crew lands and builds a domed station from which to explore the terrain. The mission is to stay for a year and launched with supplies for the second mission...but no fuel for an actual return. Think of it as a model for Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars missions (which included a lunar version as well).

The crew is kept busy for the year, exploring the surface. Unfortunately, the relief mission does not show up on schedule (and the crew does not know what happened as they have been out of radio touch being on the farside of the Moon, far enough from the horizon the lunar libration does not help.

From here, the story becomes one that anyone who has read the Andy Weir book The Martian (or who has seen the excellent movie) is familiar with: a race for survival. However, there are no potatoes among the supplies the crew brought and they must learn to live off the land in order to survive. On the airless Moon, you ask? Yes, given that Campbell did not have the benefit of drawing on a NASA database, he took the knowledge of a chemical engineer, applied a (very) liberal assumption of how hard people could work with limited resources and postulated that the crew could get hydrogen, oxygen, various metals (ranging up to things like silver, gold and lead) and make water, solar cells, engines, a rocket sled and even synthetic food to survive until the relief expedition (which turns out not to be even the fourth attempt) can arrive.

Campbell is pretty optimistic about how much a small crew can accomplish, even with easily reached resources like he postulates on the Moon. In this, he makes the same mistake as E.E. "Doc" Smith in Spacehounds of IPC (but that was quantum leaps worse, where one character essentially invents civilization in order to go from no technology back to spacefaring technology). Both draw from things like Robinson Crusoe, but all, I think, overlook how much time one must spend just surviving before one can build a base (in the case of Campbell) where you have massive tunnel complexes, individual crew quarters, a swimming pool and multiple automated factories.

Don't get me wrong, I think Campbell is on the right track here. If we are to move into the solar system and beyond, we can't bring everything with us. It's nice to find a relatively early story of space exploration like this (it puts me in mind of both The Watch Below by James White and The Planet Strappers by Raymond Z. Gallun, as well as many stories of shipwreck or exploration of the polar regions of our planet).

Now the downside: First, the writing. Campbell writes this as if it were a log being kept by the main character. As such, we get no other points of view, no internal monologue or glimpses of personality, no nothing. It's a pretty flat story. Second, the eBook. Good grief, Gateway, could you please hire a proofreader? Words are randomly capitalized, sometimes different capitalization uses in the same sentence for the same word. There were a few occasions where something probably was translated by the OCR system incorrectly, or a few incorrect uses of italics or even weird line breaks and the like. Get some human eyeballs on these books!