Review: Moonfall

Moonfall by Jack McDevitt

Recently I've been reading a lot of disaster/post apocalyptic novels as a sort of inspiration for a game I'm hoping to make someday. (Check out my blog for more details about that.)

While looking through Amazon's recommendations page that it had
made for me, I came across the novel Moonfall. I liked the description so I went ahead and got it to see what it was all about. The basic plot of the book is that in the not-too-distant future, mankind has begun to move out in the solar system. There's a base on the moon that is being officially opened and in a few days a manned mission to Mars will be begin. All in all, it seems like humanity is doing pretty good. But during a solar eclipse, a new comet is discovered. This comet is big, and it is moving very fast. The good news is that it will miss the earth. The bad news it will hit the moon. Because of its size and enormous velocity, the scientists believe it could literally smash the moon into oblivion.

The novel then follows the events of the next several days from the point of view of several different characters. I thought the author did a pretty good job of showing a large cross section of the reaction to the comet by including people like the Vice President of the US (who is on the moon to help officially open the moonbase), the scientists working to prevent tragedies from the collision, and even people who don't believe the threat from the comet is real.

I have to admit that while reading the book I was struck a few times by the "stupidity" of some of the characters in the book; I mean if you heard the moon was going to get struck by comet that was big enough to destroy it, you'd probably take notice wouldn't you? There's a lot of characters in the book who don't really seem to believe it. It seemed unrealistic at first, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that's probably what would happen in real life, because there is certainly a lot of people out there who don't seem to have a good enough grip on
reality to listen to when someone tells them they are in danger.

Overall I really liked the book. The story was great and the pacing of the book was perfect. It was like the movie "Armageddon" but with better science. In fact my only complaint about the book is the same one I hade with "Armageddon", the timeline in both seems waaaay to compressed. I know that in emergency situations time seems to slow down, but wow, in the book the people get a lot done in a very short period of time.

Overall I give it a score of 8 out of 10