'The Moon is Hell', first published in Astronomy Now, September 1998.
© Stephen Baxter 1998

The Moon is a world so close to Earth we can see its surface with the naked eye. But that surface is barren, unchanging, dead, clearly devoid of atmosphere. It does not look like an appealing place to live.

And yet the Moon had an essential role in pre-Apollo science fiction. Despite its apparent barrenness, we were told, the Moon would be replete with air, water, metals and other riches; not only would it support a colony but it would serve as an essential stepping-stone to the rest of the Solar System.

Apollo changed all that.

Slowly, however, we have come to see that the post-Apollo Moon could indeed support us, if it might require ingenuity to make it so. The Moon might even be made as rich and beautiful a place to live as Earth.

Perhaps, after all, we could learn to love the Moon.

Once the Moon was a jagged world, of saw-tooth crater walls and rock plains, where the sun blazed from a star-laden sky, and the Earth glared balefully down. But there were hidden riches - water, mineral deposits - which could support us.

Ray Cummings' Brigands of the Moon (1931) is typical of science fiction's pulp era. In the colonised solar system of 2070 the orphan Moon is an anomaly. The plot concerns the hijacking of an Earth spaceship by Martian brigands who are determined to get their hands on the Moon's one key resource, radiactum, "the catalyst mineral which was revolutionising industry". Even in 1931 Cummings was able to predict something of the required technology of a lunar colony - pressure suits, the claustrophobic conditions.

It was on the classical craggy-but-rich Moon that John Campbell set his Robinsonade epic The Moon Is Hell (1950). In 1979, a 15-man expedition is stranded on the far side. They survive for years by mining lunar gypsum for water and oxygen, making solar cells from lunar glass and lunar-night picks of solid mercury. The Moon later becomes a way-station for the further expansion into the Solar System.

This was the Moon's traditional role in the expansionist science fiction vision of the time, such as the near-future fiction of Arthur C Clarke: for example A Fall of Moondust (1961) and the lesser-known Earthlight (1955) which describes a lunar war over deep-buried uranium deposits. The Moon goes on to become "the richest and most important of all the worlds" and the key to man's further expansion.

All this optimism about the Moon's usefulness was predicated on the science of the time. Water on the Moon, at least in the form of hydrated minerals, was a part of the standard paradigm. The physicist John Gilvarry argued as late as 1960 that the lunar seas' dark colour was due to organic matter in sediment deposited in a deep lunar ocean. Tragically, however, for dreams of a bountiful life on stepping-stone Moon, all this would prove dead wrong.

The analysis of even the first Moonrock samples returned by Apollo 11 betrayed not the slightest trace of water, either now or in the past. The lack of water during the lunar crust's early melting periods ensured that big hydrothermal ore deposits-the type which produced much of Earth's mineral wealth-are completely absent from the Moon.

It suddenly became clear that life on the Moon was going to be much harder than we had hoped. The Moon continued to appear in science fiction, but was generally relegated to a side-show in the greater drama of the Solar System.

Larry Niven's short novel The Patchwork Girl (1980) is a mystery about a murder committed in a twenty-second century lunar city by someone firing a laser in through a window. This is an inverted locked-room mystery; here everyone is locked inside the room, not outside. Niven enjoyably applies his disciplined but wide-open imagination to life in the Moon - for example, the problems posed in taking a bath.

In many post-Apollo works the Moon serves as a last refuge from an Earth hit by some catastrophe. In Steel Beach by John Varley (1992) humans have been evicted by aliens and must survive on the "steel beach" of the Moon. Earth is often devastated by nuclear war or eco-collapse. Griffin's Egg by Michael Swanwick (1990) tells of lunar colonists caught in a nuclear war crossfire. Robert Reed's "Waging Good" (1995) concerns a lunar girl who, as punishment for a crime, is sent to the hell that Earth has become.

In Kim Stanley Robinson's remarkable "The Lunatics" (1988), mind-blanked criminals are sent to tunnel endlessly through the Moon's deep layers. A more old-fashioned lunar survival puzzle story is Geoffrey Landis's "A Walk in the Sun" (1991). A stranded astronaut must walk all the way around the Moon, to keep her solar panels in sunlight. The expertise with which Landis, a NASA scientist, spins his lunar yarn won this story much popularity.

As the Apollo results matured in analysis, a certain cautious optimism about the Moon began to emerge. The modern view of lunar resources lists the possible use of lunar soil as a radiation and thermal shield, or as a raw source material for concrete, glass and ceramics. The rocks may contain no water, but they do contain oxygen which could be baked out. Solar-wind hydrogen may be present in the lunar soil. Perhaps the mare plains could be melted to form gigantic solar collectors. And perhaps there is water on the Moon after all: delivered by comet impacts, it may have collected in the shadows of deep craters at the lunar poles.

This was encouraging enough to prompt a new wave of lunar colonisation tales, of a more or less gung- -ho nature, such as Allen Steele's Lunar Descent (1991) and Ben Bova's series beginning with Moonrise (1996). These works use the furniture of modern science: the South Pole water, machines to mine the rocks for oxygen and metals. But the books are strangely old-fashioned, infused by the oddly dated uncritical view of the benefits of technology often associated with American hard science fiction writers over the decades.

Ultimately more convincing is SD Howe's Honor Bound Honor Born (1996). In 1999, a one-man lunar base is set up to bootstrap an off-world expansion. But the astronaut is stranded, and like Campbell's colonists must learn to live off the land. Howe is a physicist and space planner at the Los Alamos laboratories. This self-published novel is a propaganda stunt, designed to highlight the modern view of lunar technologies and opportunities.

But will the Moon serve only as a strip-mine? Our disappointment with the Moon we visited in 1969 has coloured our view of it since. The Apollo 8 astronauts dismissed the Moon as a "misshapen golf ball ... a battlefield ... a volleyball game played on a dirty beach ..." But the Moon has its own subtle, ancient beauty, as some of the astronauts appreciated.

This beauty is evoked in Greg Bear's Heads (1990). Bear's 22nd century Moon is a world of deadness and stillness, of enclosure, of stillness and fine arts, and as such is an appropriate place to seek absolute zero - the ultimate state of stillness - and to revive the frozen brains of long-dead Earthlings. Bear's Moon is a Zen garden which shapes the people living in it, and is a comment on the maturing of American dreams.

Could the Moon enjoy a still more expansive future?

Terraforming the Moon - making it like the Earth - would be a challenge an order of magnitude more difficult even than Mars. The Moon is deficient in almost all the volatiles required for terrestrial life - carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water. And the Moon's month-long "day" would cause problems; a lunar atmosphere would freeze out during the long nights (as in HG Wells's First Men in the Moon (1901)).

The first substantial fiction on lunar terraforming seems to have been John Gribbin and Marcus Chown's Double Planet (1988). In the twenty-second century, a comet is diverted to collide with the Moon, so that it provides the Moon with a thin atmosphere. The book was written by two science journalists, and as might be expected the technical background is well worked out. But the narrative is flat, and the climax of the book- the collision of comet with Moon - is poorly visualised and remarkably undramatic. A sequel, Reunion (1991), is set five hundred years after Double Planet. But the terraformed Moon itself is a disappointment: a drab and desolate medieval landscape populated by a cowed people. The crisp lunar morning of HG Wells's The First Men in the Moon is a much more engaging and - dare one say it - realistic portrayal of what life on a transformed Moon - a true sister world for Earth - might actually be like.

The Moon has had a lousy press since Apollo. But perhaps it is time to accept our sister world for what it is. The Moon is after all a whole planet, and merely days away. With ingenuity it may be possible to live off, even prosper on, the Moon's low-grade ores.

And in an unexpected way the Moon may be, after all, the stepping-stone to the future. Earth is probably unique. But we can expect to find small rocky worlds like the Moon everywhere. If we can live off the land on the Moon, we can live anywhere.

(Note: A comprehensive bibliography of the Moon in science fiction is available on the World Wide Web at http://www2.ari.net/infoseek/.)