The novel “The Moon Children” by Jack Williamson was published for the first time in 1971, serialized in the magazine “Galaxy”.

In the years after the first Moon landing, space missions are pushed farther and farther away carrying astronauts to other planets in the solar system. These trips find possible alien life forms but some discoveries are strange and have unpredictable consequences. The astronauts on a mission to the Moon see different things and when they return to Earth their testimonies are contradictory. As if that weren’t enough, their wives give birth to children with abnormal characteristics.

Kim Hodian is the brother of one of the astronauts whose children were nicknamed the Moon Children. His nephew is the strangest among those children because he also has strong physical abnormalities that make him look far from human. Watching them grow up, revealing more and more of their extraordinary gifts, he also realizes the role of the strange crystalline material brought back to Earth by their fathers.

“The Moon Children” starts with the first man landing on the Moon. In the novel, this is just the beginning of a great development of manned space missions. The consequences, however, are unexpected because three astronauts who come back from a lunar exploration have children definitely out of the ordinary.

The birth of these children, nicknamed the Moon Children, is reminiscent of the classic “The Midwich Cuckoos” by John Wyndham, also for them demonstrating extraordinary abilities. The explicit reference to the cuckoos of that novel’s title put by Jack Williamson in his novel looks like a homage to the English classic. However, the Moon Children show immediately attitudes different from the children created by Wyndham.

The Moon Children generally show no signs of hostility towards normal humans and appear to be the first to need to understand the meaning of their existence. In particular, Guy, who among the three who were born shows such physical abnormalities that he looks really alien, seems the first victim of the aliens that have altered his father and his colleagues to give birth to the Moon Children.

The story is told in first person from the point of view of Kim Hodian, Guy’s uncle, who along with the Moon Children and the rest of humanity seeks answers to the mystery of their existence. Many hate them just because they’re different but the fear of them is combined with the other theme of the novel, the problems created by contacts with life forms from other planets in the solar system.

In their exploration of the solar system, on various planets humans have found ecosystems incompatible with the Earth’s. Some alien life forms, disturbed by that kind of invasion, head towards Earth, causing a progressive chaos because they can’t be fought in a conventional war. In some cases, they seemd diseases rather than alien invaders.

Both in the case of the Moon Children and the alien ecosystems, humans’ ignorance is the fundamental problem. Humans’ behavior in the course of their explorations is somewhat clumsy: they interfere with alien vital processes but they don’t really understood them and they haven’t discovered forms of intelligence. When alien life forms arrive on Earth, they just try to destroy them and not to communicate with them.

The universe of “The Moon Children” is full of life, even intelligent, that exist in very diverse forms. Understanding why the children of the title have been created represents for humanity the key to understanding that universe. But this is possible only by overcoming fears and misunderstandings caused by the narrow-mindedness of many humans.

Jack Williamson started writing science fiction when the stories of that genre tended to be of the adventurous type. In his maturity, this master of science fiction showed he could also address deep issues, though in this novel they deserved a greater development.

Because of the first-person narrative, the protagonist is told part of the events so they’re not described directly, removing some of the sense-of-wonder which is still abundant in the story and sometimes slowing down the pace. Jack Williamson wrote stories of limited length by today’s standards and this penalizes a bit a novel like “The Moon Children”. This is one of the cases where a longer novel, possibly with parallel subplots, would allow a better development of the themes contained.

Despite its limitations, I think that “The Moon Children” is a great novel in which Jack Williamson mixed sense-of-wonder with deep themes. I recommend reading it.