Gunpowder Moon (David Pedreira)

Gunpowder Moon
David Pedreira
HarperVoyager
Fiction, Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: The Moon smells like gunpowder, a cordite stink noted by everyone from the first astronauts to the miners of the late twenty-first century, but no weapon has ever been fired there. Until now...
When veteran Caden Dechert took a job to the Moon, he hoped he could finally leave the worst of Earth behind. Even a massive climate collapse that nearly dropped civilization back to the Dark Ages for a few decades couldn't break humanity's war addiction, and Dechert is beyond tired of killing for whatever cause top brass cooks up. So far, space has been subject of a tenuous peace, even as commercial ventures race to harvest water and raw materials (particularly helium-3, the fuel that may take humans to the stars) and spacefaring nations stake their claims everywhere from the Moon to Jupiter. Sure, there's been some saber-rattling and diplomatic one-upmanship, particularly between America and China, but nobody would be foolish enough to start anything on the lunar surface. Up here, the rule is help whoever needs helping, because death is too close at hand for everyone. Nationalism and violence are old Earth habits, best left behind.
Then Dechert and the crew of the American mining base Sea of Serenity 1 discover acts of sabotage on remote equipment... and one of their own dies after someone plants a bomb on their vehicle.
The obvious suspect is their nearest lunar neighbor, the Chinese base New Beijing 2. But even as the military and the mining administrators ramp up the rhetoric and start stockpiling weapons for the first-ever offworld armed conflict, Dechert just can't bring himself to believe it. He knows the commander of New Beijing 2. It just doesn't make sense that the Chinese would provoke a conflict like this when they have at least as much to lose as the Americans, and the logistics stretch credulity to the breaking point. With everyone else eager to spill blood, Dechert races against the clock to figure out who really killed his crewmate, and why they seem so eager to get more people killed.

REVIEW: Gunpowder Moon has an interesting concept and setting, and a decent enough main character in the war-weary veteran-turned-mining-base-commander Dechert. At some point, though, I found myself left behind by the story and characters, lost in a sea of flashbacks and tactics and a testosterone-heavy cast.
From the beginning, the innate strangeness of lunar existence is clearly established, along with the Moon's inherent hostility (or indifference indistinguishable from hostility) to Earth life. This is not a place humans will ever really belong, not when jagged grains of regolith perpetually defy the best filtration and threaten machinery and life support, temperatures flux between deep freeze and lethally hot, solar radiation makes prolonged surface exposure deadly, gravity and distances are deceptive, and more threats await even the experienced astronaut. Nor are extraplanetary bases technological utopias; sent by penny-pinching private conglomerates and cash-strapped desperate nations still clawing their way back to their former glory after global disasters, everything that doesn't directly increase productivity and profit margins is neglected, regardless of how it might endanger the lives of those working there. Crews tend to be eccentric and tightly-knit groups, a byproduct of close quarters living in an inherently dangerous environment (like life in a war zone or on an oil rig, only exponentially more isolated), and if you can't trust the guy (or, very rarely, girl) in the bunk next to yours, you can't trust anyone. Or, at least, that's how it used to be, before the sabotage comes to light and the Moon experiences its first homicide.
Dechert left active military service when he could no longer take the killing and the losses among his comrades and subordinates; they always start feeling like family to him, and somehow they always die while he survives. His lunar job was supposed to be a way to get away from all that, yet he nevertheless finds himself thinking of the little crew of Sea of Serenity 1 as yet another family... so when one of them is killed - not in a combat situation where death is part of the ambient risks, but on the Moon, the one place humans have yet to sully with violence - he can't help but take it personally. Even from the start, he knows something doesn't sound right about the official party line, that it was all China's fault. But how is he supposed to find the truth when his every message is monitored by both the military and the mining corporation, and will anyone even listen once it becomes clear how many people were champing at the bit to declare a lunar war? Given his own experiences, which are related through numerous flashbacks, one would think Dechert would be a little less credulous that the wheels of war could be so easily stopped by the efforts of one man, though at least part of that is his own sheer desperation to end the insanity that has ruined his life and so many others. Even as he digs for answers, the base is taken over by soldiers and things quickly spin out of control.
It's clear that Pedreira did quite a bit of research to get the physics and the tactics right... and here is where the story started to lose me, as the technical details and tactics grow into long, sometimes confusing slogs and occasional name soup. Peripheral characters often feel like too-familiar military sci-fi tropes (particularly the lone woman on Dechert's crew, Lane, who is never overtly ogled or romanced by him yet somehow still feels objectified). The pacing, between those slogs, is pretty brisk, and it builds to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion, though the wrap-up after the fact becomes another slog, driving home its themes about war seeming to be an innate and inextricable trait of the human species with the subtlety of a meteor. I've read worse stories, but once more this ultimately just isn't my cup of cocoa.

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