Book Review: Moonfall

Jack McDevitt
1998
Nominations: Nebula
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

Moonfall is a disaster novel that does not hold back. It contains just about every kind of space- and Earth-based natural disaster you could possibly think of, except possibly killer tornadoes.  And the disasters come one after the other in rapid succession—just as one is being solved, a worse one is looming on the horizon—so the characters have no time to plan very far ahead, much less to sleep.

Before this, I had only read McDevitt’s space exploration novels, which I like very much and which are shorter and crisper and tend to be more about intrigue than action. But with Moonfall I was impressed with his creativity, his realism, and how he managed the pacing to keep the tension going at a high level from beginning to end in this longer format.

This book starts, as any good disaster novel should, with calm opening scenes of ordinary people going about their work and hobbies and family lives as usual, never suspecting that within hours everything is going to change drastically.

One of these ordinary people is Tomiko Harrington, an amateur astronomer out on a clear night in 2024 near St. Louis observing a total solar eclipse. During the eclipse she spots a star she has never seen before and that shouldn’t be there, and reports it to the authorities.

Gradually, the authorities realize that (a) the anomalous star is a comet; (b) it’s an interstellar comet traveling about a hundred times faster than a normal comet; (c) it’s headed straight for the moon and will get there in a matter of days.

Charlie Haskell, the U.S. vice president, actually happens to be on the moon at the time. He’s there with a whole bunch of staffers and Secret Service personnel to do a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the official opening of the U.S.’s new Moonbase installation. And there are also about 1,700 scientists and administrators living at Moonbase already. But nobody is all that worried; they think they have enough space vehicles of various kinds to evacuate everyone to safety either to Earth or to an orbital space station by the time the comet hits.

Except that, of course, they have mechanical difficulties with a couple of the space planes. And, with the complications that result, it turns out that they don’t actually have enough time to get everyone off the moon after all. And, unfortunately for Vice President Haskell, he has already said publicly that he’d be the last one off—to “close the door and turn out the lights”—never thinking that might mean he’d be in mortal danger.

Because by now the astronomers have realized that since the comet is traveling so fast, it has the force to actually break the moon apart completely when it hits.

And to make matters worse, if the moon breaks up, there is the distinct possibility that chunks—potentially really big chunks—of moon rock will fall onto the Earth.

As this is all happening, the tension is gradually increasing, ramping up slowly but steadily until you and all the characters are wound as tight as drums. By the time the last plane arrives at Moonbase to try to pull off a daring rescue of the vice president and five other people who have volunteered to be the last to leave, everyone is racing around, trying to get the vehicle fueled and loaded and off the ground as fast as possible. There is no time to spare, and the anxiety is palpable.

Then, seconds after they lift off, the comet actually hits the moon and everything switches almost into slow motion. The impact itself is beautifully written; it seemed very realistic, with the blinding light of the actual explosion sweeping over the moon and then the moon’s surface first shuddering and trembling and then starting to collapse.

And then, after that moment’s pause, the pace shifts into high gear again as the vice president’s plane attempts to outrun the rapidly expanding shock wave of fire and chunks of moon debris the size of city blocks.

After that, the characters have to discover, evaluate, and solve one disaster after another that with the barest of resources and almost no sleep. Sure enough, the moon does break up and pieces do fall to earth, causing earthquakes, landslides, and super-giant tidal waves that wipe out most of both U.S. coasts. And the whole time, the passenger-bearing space planes have their own mini-disasters, running out of fuel and air and being hit by moon shrapnel. McDevitt also often gives you clues as to what is about to go wrong, which is great because knowing that it’s going to happen and having to wait for it makes it all the more tense.

Eventually, the little multivariate disasters subside and the main characters’ concerns narrow down to one central final crisis: a moon rock a kilometer and a half long that is headed straight for Earth. This is a giant civilization-killer of a meteor and everybody has to pull together to figure out a solution. Except that by now they’re down to their last seven remaining space planes, and right-wing militia members, misguidedly seeing an opportunity in the pending apocalypse, are trying to use rocket launchers to shoot down the planes.

The only real issue I had with the book was that the narrative had a tendency to get scattered. McDevitt does spend most of his time on the stories of his main characters: the vice president, the president, some key space station personnel, and a couple of the space pilots. But he also sprinkles in lots of little vignettes about random minor characters, many of whom only appear once or twice: a woman at a Manhattan cocktail party; a Coast Guard cutter captain off Long Island Sound; a retiree in Rhode Island; a nurse in San Francisco; a furniture factory manager in Pennsylvania.

He does create a good diversity of characters, and it might have seemed a good way to help us monitor what was happening in different parts of the United States while the central action was happening in space, but it was just too many stories to follow, especially when they didn't lead anywhere. I didn’t know which ones to settle into and which ones I could safely coast through as just background color. And we often snapped from one to the other very quickly, so at times it made the flow feel choppy.

But, in general, McDevitt’s pacing, realism, and talent for telling the central story make up for the sometimes choppiness. As would happen in a catastrophe of this size, lots of people in leadership positions do not come out looking very good (including the president). And all kinds of people become heroes who never expected to be (including the vice president, who somehow ends up single-handedly solving almost every problem that crops up in space). And many people do die. And the tension continues right to the end; even up to the very last two pages, you still aren’t sure, after everything the Earth's people have been through, if they’re going to survive the final mega-meteor disaster or not.