by Neil Clarke
THE EAGLE HAS LANDED
ALSO EDITED BY NEIL CLARKE
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THE EAGLE HAS LANDED
50 YEARS OF LUNAR SCIENCE FICTION
EDITED BY NEIL CLARKE
Night Shade Books
NEW YORK | NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 2019 by Neil Clarke
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Night Shade Books, 101 Hudson Street, 37th Floor, Jersey City, NJ 07302.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Clarke, Neil, 1966- editor.
Title: The Eagle has landed : 50 years of lunar science fiction / edited by Neil Clarke.
Description: New York : Night Shade Books, [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019004686| ISBN 9781949102093 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781597809993 (paperback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Moon--Exploration--Fiction. | Science fiction—20th century. | Science fiction—21st century. | Short stories--20th century. | Short stories--21st century.
Classification: LCC PS648.S3 E24 2019 | DDC 813/.0876208--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004686
eISBN: 978-1-59780-653-4
Cover illustration by Mack Sztaba
Cover design by Claudia Noble
Please see page 575 for an extension of this copyright page.
Printed in the United States of America
For everyone that made the Moon landings possible and the people working so hard to make it happen again.
CONTENTS
Introduction—Neil Clarke
Bagatelle—John Varley
The Eve of the Last Apollo—Carter Scholz
The Lunatics—Kim Stanley Robinson
Griffin’s Egg—Michael Swanwick
A Walk in the Sun—Geoffrey A. Landis
Waging Good—Robert Reed
How We Lost the Moon, A True Story by Frank W. Allen—Paul McAuley
People Came from Earth—Stephen Baxter
Ashes and Tombstones—Brian Stableford
Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s—Adam Troy Castro
Stories for Men—John Kessel
The Clear Blue Seas of Luna—Gregory Benford
You Will Go to the Moon—William Preston
SeniorSource—Kristine Kathryn Rusch
The Economy of Vacuum—Sarah Thomas
The Cassandra Project—Jack McDevitt
Fly Me to the Moon—Marianne J. Dyson
Tyche and the Ants—Hannu Rajaniemi
The Moon Belongs to Everyone—Michael Alexander and K.C. Ball
The Fifth Dragon—Ian McDonald
Let Baser Things Devise—Berrien C. Henderson
The Moon is Not a Battlefield—Indrapramit Das
Every Hour of Light and Dark—Nancy Kress
In Event of Moon Disaster—Rich Larson
Permissions
About the Editor
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 ed
itors 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 . . .
1976
John Varley is the author of several short story collections and fourteen novels, the latest of which is Irontown Blues. Over the course of his forty-five year career, he has won the Locus, Prometheus, Nebula, and Hugo awards. “Bagatelle” is the first of several of his Anna-Louise Bach Lunar detective stories.
BAGATELLE
John Varley
There was a bomb on the Leystrasse, level forty-five, right outside the Bagatelle Flower and Gift Shoppe, about a hundred meters down the promenade from Prosperity Plaza.
“I am a bomb,” the bomb said to passersby. “I will explode in four hours, five minutes, and seventeen seconds. I have a force equal to fifty thousand English tons of trinitrololuene.”
A small knot of people gathered to look at it.
“I will go off in four hours, four minutes, and thirty-seven seconds.”
A few people became worried as the bomb talked on. They remembered business elsewhere and hurried away, often toward the tube trains to King City. Eventually, the trains became overcrowded and there was some pushing and shoving.
The bomb was a metal cylinder, a meter high, two meters long, mounted on four steerable wheels. There was an array of four television cameras mounted on top of the cylinder, slowly scanning through ninety degrees. No one could recall how it came to be there. It looked a little like the municipal street-cleaning machines; perhaps no one had noticed it because of that.
“I am rated at fifty kilotons,” the bomb said, with a trace of pride.
The police were called.
“A nuclear bomb, you say?” Municipal Police Chief Anna-Louise Bach felt sourness in the pit of her stomach and reached for a box of medicated candy. She was overdue for a new stomach, but the rate she went through them on her job, coupled with the size of her paycheck, had caused her to rely more and more on these stopgap measures. And the cost of cloned transplants was going up.
“It says fifty kilotons,” said the man on the screen. “I don’t see what else it could be. Unless it’s just faking, of course. We’re moving in radiation detectors.”
“You said ‘it says.’ Are you speaking of a note, or phone call, or what?”
“No. It’s talking to us. Seems friendly enough, too, but we haven’t gotten around to asking it to disarm itself. It could be that its friendliness won’t extend that far.”
“No doubt.” She ate another candy. “Call in the bomb squad, of course. Then tell them to do nothing until I arrive, other than look the situation over. I’m going to make a few calls, then I’ll be there. No more than thirty minutes.”
“All right. Will do.”
There was nothing for it but to look for help. No nuclear bomb had ever been used on Luna. Bach had no experience with them, nor did her bomb crew. She brought her computer on line.
Roger Birkson liked his job. It wasn’t so much the working conditions— which were appalling—but the fringe benefits. He was on call for thirty days, twenty-four hours a day, at a salary that was nearly astronomical. Then he got eleven months’ paid vacation. He was paid for the entire year whether or not he ever had to exercise his special talents during his thirty days’ duty. In that way, he was like a firefighter. In a way, he was a firefighter.
He spent his long vacations in Luna. No one had ever asked Birkson why he did so; had they asked, he would not have known. But the reason was a subconscious conviction that one day the entire planet Earth would blow up in one glorious fireball. He didn’t want to be there when it happened.
Birkson’s job was bomb disarming for the geopolitical administrative unit called CommEcon Europe. On a busy shift he might save the lives of twenty million CE Europeans.
Of the thirty-five Terran bomb experts vacationing on Luna at the time of the Leystrasse bomb scare, Birkson happened to be closest to the projected epicenter of the blast. The Central Computer found him twenty-five seconds after Chief Bach rang off from her initial report. He was lining up a putt on the seventeenth green of the Burning Tree underground golf course, a half kilometer from Prosperity Plaza, when his bag of clubs began to ring.
Birkson was wealthy. He employed a human caddy instead of the mechanical sort. The caddy dropped the flag he had been holding and went to answer it. Birkson took a few practice swings but found that his concentration had been broken. He relaxed and took the call.
“I need your advice,” Bach said, without preamble. “I’m the Chief of Municipal Police for New Dresden, Anna-Louise Bach. I’ve had a report on a nuclear bomb on the Leystrasse, and I don’t have anyone with your experience in these matters. Could you meet me at the tube station in ten minutes?”
“Are you crazy? I’m shooting for a seventy-five with two holes to go, an easy three-footer on seventeen and facing a par five on the last hole, and you expect me to go chasing after a hoax?”
“Do you know it to be a ho
ax?” Bach asked, wishing he would say yes.
“Well, no, I just now heard about it, myself. But ninety percent of them are, you know.”
“Fine. I suggest you continue your game. And since you’re so sure, I’m going to have Burning Tree sealed off for the duration of the emergency. I want you right there.”
Birkson considered this.
“About how far away is this ‘Leystrasse’?”
“About six hundred meters. Five levels up from you, and one sector over. Don’t worry. There must be dozens of steel plates between you and the hoax. You just sit tight, all right?”
Birkson said nothing.
“I’ll be at the tube station in ten minutes,” Bach said. “I’ll be in a special capsule. It’ll be the last one for five hours.” She hung up.
Birkson contemplated the wall of the underground enclosure. Then he knelt on the green and lined up his putt. He addressed the ball, tapped it, and heard the satisfying rattle as it sank into the cup.
He looked longingly at the eighteenth tee, then jogged off to the clubhouse.
“I’ll be right back,” he called over his shoulder.
Bach’s capsule was two minutes late, but she had to wait another minute for Birkson to show up. She fumed, trying not to glance at the timepiece embedded in her wrist.
He got in, still carrying his putter, and their heads were jerked back as the capsule was launched. They moved for only a short distance, then came to a halt. The door didn’t open.
“The system’s probably tied up,” Bach said, squirming. She didn’t like to see the municipal services fail in the company of this Terran.
“Ah,” Birkson said, flashing a grin with an impossible number of square teeth. “A panic evacuation, no doubt. You didn’t have the tube system closed down, I suppose?”
“No,” she said. “I . . . well, I thought there might be a chance to get a large number of people away from the area in case this thing does go off.”