The novel “Luna: New Moon” by Ian McDonald was published for the first time in 2015. It’s the first novel in the Luna series.

Lucasinho Corta and other teenagers complete a rite of passage by surviving a race in the void on the Moon’s surface. To celebrate the feat, his family holds a party attended by representatives of all the “Five Dragons”, the most important families of the Moon. During the party, someone tries to kill Rafa Corta, the family’s heir, and the attack fails thanks to the intervention of an employee, Marina Calzaghe.

While the Corta family tries to discover the author of the attack, Lucasinho runs away while Marina Calzaghe remains involved in the intrigues of the Five Dragons. Adriana Corta, the matriarch of the family, is dying and must think about leaving a stable future with possible alliances with other families trying to avoid the risk that the rivalries result in a war.

In 2014 Ian McDonald published the novelette “The Fifth Dragon“, which told the beginning of Adriana Corta’s story on the Moon. Arriving from Earth, she had to make crucial decisions for her future that had a profound influence not only on her future life because after a few decades her helium-3 mining company made her family one of the most important on the Moon, called the “Five Dragons”. “Luna: New Moon” begins when Adriana Corta is an elderly woman and the author throws the reader in the midst of the complex relationships among her family’s members and the intrigues that mark the relationship among the Five Dragons.

The exploitation of the Moon’s resources is regulated by a legal system based on agreements between the parties, without a criminal law comparable to those of the Earth’s nations. There’s an almost feudal system with the Five Dragons being close to the noble families of the Earth’s monarchies and having great powers. In this situation, rivalries and quarrels can be resolved through agreements or with a trial by combat between representatives of the two parties. However, sometimes they can also lead to armed battles.

To create this Moon society, Ian McDonald got inspired by works that are not only of science fiction such as the Dune cycle but also fantasy ones such as “Game of Thrones” and contemporary works such as the TV show “Dallas” and “The Godfather” movies. For the author, the future on the Moon is far from utopian, and the struggles for power will be ruthless there too.

In “Luna: New Moon” advanced technologies are used that we can expect to see developed during this century but in the end it’s a story of human beings, whose underlying motivations are always the same. Basically, it’s a science fiction story that however has the flavor of a very classic drama.

Initially for the reader it’s not easy to get into the intrigues among the Five Dragons because Ian McDonald provides information on the characters, their families and their complex relationships through details placed here and there and through dialogues between characters. The lack of infodump allows the author to keep a pace that’s generally fast except in the parts in which Adriana Corta tells a part of her personal story but it takes a little patience to get into the plot’s intricacies.

In some ways, Marina Calzaghe is the most important character in helping the reader with her point of view. She’s a girl who came from Earth in search for luck and is still learning how to behave in order to survive in the harsh Moon’s environment and the complexities of the society that formed with so many intrigues. In some ways, her story has parallels with the one told by Adriana Corta showing the differences between the two women when they have to make crucial decisions for their lives but also how the Moon changed over the course of a few decades.

Another element that in my opinion is a strong point but can at the same time be another difficulty for the reader is the use of terms in various languages. The Moon’s society is multiethnic and multicultural, with a consequent influence on the language. “Luna: New Moon” is focused in particular on the Corta family, whose matriarch arrived from Brazil, with the consequence that her native language is Portuguese and is also used by her children and grandchildren.

The many words, sometimes whole phrases, in Portuguese scattered here and there in the novel help the readers to immerse in the story and there’s a small dictionary that contains the meaning of the most important words. However, for those who don’t know that language at all, the dialogues between the members of the Corta family might be a little tough.

All this leads to a complex novel with many characters of which Ian McDonald inevitably develops only the main ones. The ending is very open because “Luna: New Moon” is the first part of a larger story in what is planned as a trilogy of novels. I think this first book is definitely promising so if you like series full of intrigue I recommend it.