2019

INTRODUCTION

Neil Clarke

On July 20th, 1969, the world watched as Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. Six hours later, mission commander Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on its surface, uttering the now famous, “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” He was joined on the surface about twenty minutes later by Buzz Aldrin while Michael Collins piloted the command module Columbia in lunar orbit.

I was three years old as these events unfolded. My father once told me that he intentionally kept me awake that evening, so I wouldn’t miss this historic event, even if I wouldn’t remember it. On CBS, Walter Cronkite interviewed veteran science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein about the momentous occasion and what could come next. Space stations, lunar colonies, larger ships with mixed gender crews, and children born in space were all predicted to occur by the end of the century. There was joy and optimism about our future out among the stars. The full interview can be found on YouTube and is a fascinating look into that moment in history. Check it out sometime.

Three short years later, Apollo 17 set records for the longest lunar mission, longest total moonwalks, largest lunar sample, and longest time in lunar orbit. It also marked the end of our manned lunar exploration. There were three more Apollo missions scheduled, but despite the benefits we had gained from the space program, they were canceled due to budgetary constraints and we never returned. The Apollo capsules were soon repurposed for the Apollo-Soyuz and Skylab space station missions.

This anthology is a fifty-year retrospective of lunar science fiction stories that were written after Apollo 11, an event that happened seven years before I began regularly reading science fiction. As such, this project required a lot more research than I’ve needed to do for the previous anthologies I’ve edited. Essentially, it proved to be a deep dive into the stories of my youth and revealed some things about what was happening in SF that I was too young to notice at the time.

The Moon was a hot topic in science fiction in the decades leading up to the Apollo missions, and several anthologies—like Donald A. Wollheim’s Men on the Moon (1958) and Mike Ashley’s Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventures (2018)—explore this territory. The idea for this anthology was to explore the consequences of reality colliding with science fiction. Little did I notice in my youth that one of the big consequences of landing on the Moon would be that science fiction would run away from it. In retrospect, it makes sense. If you listen to that Cronkite interview I mentioned, you can hear them talking about an immediate future that today sounds like science fiction, but was inevitable in their minds. Science fiction compensated by abandoning the Moon and moving beyond.

This theory seemed to explain why I was having so much difficulty finding lunar stories from the 70s and 80s to include, even from authors that had once regularly explored the theme. To confirm my suspicions, I started reaching out to editors and authors from that time period and was given a resounding affirmative that the move was a deliberate act by both editors and authors. The Moon was considered too close to the news and no longer fertile science fiction territory. Authors refocused their sights on Mars, the asteroid belt, and beyond. Even when the Apollo missions were canceled, it still seemed inevitable that we would return, so it remained this way for some time.

[One of the editors I spoke to also cited Robert A. Heinlein’s novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) as an additional contributing factor. It dealt with the theme very thoroughly and left some thinking there was little left to say.]

As a result of these influences on the field, I ended up including very few stories from the first twenty years after Apollo 11. I found about a dozen more than you’ll find here, several of which were by authors I have included other works by. John Varley, for example, appears to be an exception to the norm, publishing several of his Anna-Louise Bach stories set on the Moon during this time period. The remaining works by other writers varied wildly and often had only a tangential connection to the Moon. Also, as it happens sometimes with these projects, there was one story I wanted, but I was unsuccessful at securing the reprint rights. After months of research and outreach, I think I’ve found all that I can mine from that era. While I would have liked the decades to be more balanced, in reality, they weren’t, so that is reflected here.

By the 90s, a newer generation of writers and editors saw the Moon differently and it began to make its way back into mainstream SF magazines and anthologies. With some regularity many of these stories began to appear in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and by 1997, Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams had published enough to assemble Asimov’s Moons, a paperback reprint anthology. To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Moon landing, Peter Crowther edited an anthology titled Moon Shots, which included original science fiction stories, a few of which are included here. Among those is a story by Stephen Baxter, perhaps the most prolific author of Moon stories at the time.

As the new century turned over—leaving most of the predictions made that Apollo 11 evening unrealized—a new magazine with a stated goal of promoting lunar exploration was launched. Artemis Magazine—which debuted at the 1999 Worldcon with a 2000 cover date—published eight issues between 2000 and 2003 before closing its doors. While other magazines and anthologies continued to be reliable sources of lunar science fiction, the theme never returned to the level of popularity it experienced during the 50s and earlier. Even the resurgence of short fiction brought upon by ebooks and online magazines didn’t create a significant growth in the number of these stories published, but they did continue to provide homes for them.

Several recent lunar missions have created some excitement about the presence of water on the Moon. Combined with the increasing interest and discussion about possible manned missions to Mars, the Moon has become more and more attractive as a waypoint. As I write this, NASA officials are on TV proclaiming that they would like to return to the Moon in the late 2020s to build a sustainable base—a strategy believed to be a critical step towards deeper exploration and possible habitation on Mars.

It’s my hope that we not only return to the Moon, but also that this time, science fiction continues to embrace Luna as a meaningful part our future. The ideas that fueled those old predictions are still worth working towards and science fiction has ongoing opportunity to demonstrate that positive vision. Those stories are more important now than ever if we are to secure that future out among the stars . . .