On My Shelves: Mutineer’s Moon

David Weber is probably best known for his Honor Harrington space opera series, but this is my favorite of his books.

Colin MacIntyre is pilot of a NASA experimental moon vessel sometime in the not-too-distant future, with a simple-seeming mission: use a new "gravitonic" probe to map the mass distribution of the moon in detail. Unlike prior gravity surveys that merely use the slight variations in mass to give a very general idea of the mass distribution, the gravitonic probe should provide fine detail of structure and composition.

But the data he sees is… odd. Really odd. Almost as though there are extensive caverns throughout the interior of the Moon.

And then an alien vessel appears, takes control of his ship with technology far beyond his, and brings him into a huge landing area within the Moon.

Except… that's not quite the case. Because it's not so much that there's a base inside the Moon; rather, we haven't had a moon for tens of thousands of years. What we know as "the Moon" is actually a starship, a warship two thousand miles across, covered with just enough dust and rock to make it a convincing substitute for the Moon.

This, and the explanation for this outrageous state of affairs – and why the AI controlling the ship, called Dahak, had to capture Colin MacIntyre and reveal these things to him – is one of the biggest overall blasts of "sensawunda" I've ever gotten from a book since Doc Smith.

And that's appropriate, because Mutineer's Moon, and even more so its sequel The Armageddon Inheritance, is in many ways a modern Doc Smith adventure, with a game of manipulation and shadow war extending over ages between two sides, one trying to do the right thing, the other descending ever farther into darkness, super-powered warriors, weapons of incredible destructive power, and a far greater cosmic threat waiting in the background for the heroes to face once they've dealt with something that merely threatens their world.

At the same time, this is very much a character driven story. Even the worst of the villains are characterized, and we see how they went from merely schemingly opportunistic to complete monsters. We meet others who made the mistake of siding with Anu (the worst and leader of the adversaries) and who then changed their minds, and have dedicated their lives to trying to set right what they helped go wrong. We watch Colin MacIntyre try to grapple with a war fifty thousand years old and the fact that he, alone, is going to have to take the initiative to somehow put an end to it – or the entire world may pay the price.

And we watch Dahak try to grasp the process of becoming, well, human. In some ways, Dahak is the most interesting of the characters, because he is the most paradoxically powerful and powerless being in the book. A starship with the power to destroy worlds, Dahak's programming and mission drastically restrict his ability to act, and the frustration of being unable to complete the tasks left to him by his long-dead crew gnaws away at him. Even worse, he is aware of a far more terrible threat to Earth and possibly other worlds… but has no power to act against it unless and until the conflict that led to him being stranded in orbit around Earth is truly resolved.

Politics and personal interaction alternate with straight-up kickass military action all across the globe in a very tightly paced and well-written adventure that has kept me up later than I should be on more than one night – even on second or third re-read. Mutineer's Moon is one of the best examples of modern space opera, one that brings the sense of wonder and adventure of the Golden Age up to date and makes use of all the wonders we've created since… and still leaving more for us to wonder at.

Very highly recommended!