Radiantflux's Reviews > Red Moon

108th book for 2018.

I love KSR. I started reading him when he first started publishing short stories and so am always happy when he publishes a new book.

Unfortunately, this is not one of his better books. His characters are OK, but even more one-dimensional than normal. My favorite character in fact was a primitive AI. His descriptions of the Moon was OK, but again nothing really special.

The plot itself is (largely) a strange sort of roadtrip, bouncing a pregnant Chinese activist/princeling and an autistic quantum programmer back and forth from the Moon to China, accompanied at various stages by a Chinese sage/poet/cloud-travel-writer. Unfortunately KSR wastes much of the promise here, and the insights gained are relatively thin.

I did enjoy the messy descriptions of an emergency home birth at low G. If gibbons can do it, why not humans? And of course it was satisfying to read of the collapse of the global capitalist system brought on in large part by a primitive QM AI program. Go mass human demonstrators. Go blockchain anarchistic collectivists! Go Carbon Dollars! Well done Little Eyeball!

Three-stars.