PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksMoon Rising shouldn’t and really can’t be read as a stand-alone novel ... Heroes will be revealed, villains will receive their punishments, while many others, if left alive, will simply be broken by this corporate-cum-imperial hostile takeover. As such, the tone of this final volume is notably different from the earlier books in the series, which is reflected by its comparably somber opening ... It’s a novel of the aftermath, an accounting for the deaths and destruction that took place in the earlier two installments. Perhaps its key ethical question centers on the conflict between political-financial calculation and mourning as the responsibility for such decisions ... McDonald keeps up the pace, but this is a lot to resolve (and it’s not even close to everything) ... But resolution is harder than destruction, and in this sense, the closing of the Luna trilogy faced a rather similar problem to the closing of that series to which it was so often compared: HBO’s Game of Thrones. How do you positively conclude such a narrative if what you have is a thoroughly anti-utopian dystopia? ... Luna’s overarching narrative has always dallied with notions of fate and the predicted importance of Ariel Corta’s destiny for the Moon. In a rather original twist, however, it replaces such fantastical notions of fate and necromancy with financial fiscalmancy and AI quantum computing prediction analytics. In one sense, finance likes to mask itself as fate, producing the future as the inevitable outcome of its risk-leveraging calculations ... One of the more provocative ideas developed in the novel is the idea of a permanent financial regime and the end of such \'natural\' boom and bust cycles ... In short, how do we salvage a sense of the future from a present based on the immiserating of the many at the hands of the few? How Luna Rising resolves these questions is ultimately less important than the fact that it is asking them.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
