The novella “The Man Who Sold The Moon” by Cory Doctorow was published for the first time in 2014.
Greg Harrison has just received the result of a medical test that turned out negative. When he’s still shaken by having dodged a cancer, he accidentally runs into a young man who calls himself Pug, and he discovers they share some interests. Pug has built a 3D printer that uses sand to build bricks to assemble a yurt, and when he’s diagnosed with an incurable cancer, Greg decides to launch a version of it to the Moon, where it could use ground dust as a building material.
In 1950 Robert A. Heinlein published the novella “The Man Who Sold the Moon”, in which the wealthy businessman Delos D. Harriman financed the first journey to the Moon. The protagonist is quite a ruthless man, and the plot follows above all the story’s economic element with the problems related to the financing of a feat that at the time was really science fiction by examining the steps that a man like Harriman could take to achieve what he wanted. Cory Doctorow wrote a novella inspired by Heinlein’s which, however, reflects today’s situation, which is completely different.
Greg Harrison – I swear while reading the novella I read Harriman! – is a forty-year-old man who made some money finding himself in the right place at the right time with a start-up opened in the 1990s, and can live with the money he earned because he’s not interested in luxuries. His involvement in the 3D printer project is connected to the maker culture, very different from that of the cutthroat businessmen told by Heinlein. When Pug is diagnosed with cancer and Greg thinks that sending a 3D printer to the Moon would be a way to ensure his immortality, funding is raised through a crowdfunding campaign, not with commercial deals with corporations sometimes obtained with some dirty tricks.
Actually, much of Cory Doctorow’s novella is so anchored in today’s reality that it could be the chronicle of a real story. The differences with Heinlein’s work are profound, but Doctorow also makes some political and economic considerations, not only regarding the Moon mission or the world of technology, remembering the speculative bubble of the dot-com, but more generally, for example with reflections on the (non) problem of world hunger.
Even the second part of Cory Doctorow’s work, focused on the Moon mission with its consequences, doesn’t seem so science fiction today. This novella was published in 2015, when the Google Lunar XPRIZE had already started, and in the following years various announcements about a new race to the Moon arrived. The Chinese sent various landers and rovers to it, but more recently NASA’s preparation of the Artemis program has begun, which aims to return astronauts to the Moon. NASA has already selected private partner companies to transport various cargoes. There were also other Moon missions such as the landing attempt by the Israeli lander Beresheet.
In the end, “The Man Who Sold the Moon” is quite borderline thinking about how realistic the technologies described are, including 3D printing. Cory Doctorow also created characters that seemed well built to me and could be people you can find in the real world. For these reasons, I recommend reading it regardless of genre labels. You don’t need to have read Heinlein’s novella to appreciate Doctorow’s. You can also find it in some anthologies.
