Do not buy Red Moon for its literary merits ... There are great indigestible tracts of expository dialogue. There is a horrible doldrum of narrative drift in the middle as the physicist and the princess fester away in Hong Kong. The ending is abrupt and anticlimactic ... Read this book instead for its thorough and irresistible imagination. Read it as an extended love letter to China. Read it for its insights into the impossibility of total surveillance, the limitations of machine learning, the unbearable brightness of sunshine on the Moon’s dead surface and the true nature of power. Read it as the work of a man who has looked long and hard at the modern world and seen it for what it is with the clear gaze of a hyper-informed stranger. On its own terms – and it should not really be judged by any other standard — Red Moon is a masterpiece.
Sci-fi fans will love the detail and the optimism about humanity’s future in space. Not so comforting are the penetrating comments about politics on Earth. But in grown-up sci fi, of which Mr. Robinson is the pre-eminent producer, it’s all about mozhe shitou guo he—'crossing the river by feeling the stones,' the author’s enigmatic quote from Deng Xiaoping.
So on the one hand, moon murder! And who doesn't love that? On the other, there's Kim Stanley Robinson laying down an extended, 400-page riff on a future where an ascendant China has become the world's superpower and human law, politics, class and culture are all being reforged in the harsh environment of lunar colonies. That's how he chose to write his book. And that's fine. It's just no way to tell a story ... in Red Moon you can really see the strings. It feels like a spoonful-of-sugar-helps-the-medicine-go-down kind of situation. Give 'em a little moon murder and then they'll GLADLY stick around for my lecture on quantum cryptography! ... Red Moon reads like a TED Talk being given in the middle of a car chase. Too often, it sacrifices rhythm and structure for pages of back-and-forth debate. Fascinating, sure. Occasionally revolutionary, and beautifully deliberated. But ultimately it makes for a book that is too dry, didactic and choppy to sustain itself through to the end.
[The book is] a thriller-type plot but it doesn’t read like a thriller. The pace is slow and the narrative is regularly interspersed with reflections, the characters are thoughtful, shootouts are rare – there is no visceral sense of jeopardy ... There are many pleasures to be found here, including the characters ... For those who like it, there’s also plenty of future tech, (detailed descriptions of which do sometimes slow the drama) as well as beautiful descriptions of lunar landscapes. But for me the highlight was the relationship between Fred and Qi: a delightful and touching depiction of two people who would normally have nothing to do with each other, finding a way of getting along.
A promising set-up ... but laid-back is the whole novel. Red Moon never really sits forward, let alone gets to its feet. Mystery dissipates and narrative momentum stalls ... though it has the flavor of a young adult novel, Red Moon is too long and infodumpy to work as YA; and taken as adult fiction it’s stretched all too thin ... All this would matter less if the book lived up to Robinson’s usual standard of thought-provoking ideation. But it doesn’t. There’s no sense here of the buzzing interplay of concepts and analysis that characterized Robinson’s last novel ... There are various blots and clumsinesses, unusual for a writer as meticulous as Robinson ... Robinson usually writes better than this ... That Robinson has done all these things in earlier novels (and done them better) makes this book less Red Moon than Retread Moon.
... torturous ... Qi and Fred’s friendship is the closest thing Red Moon has to a heart. But for their relatively small role in the whole, it’s a stone-cold story far less interested in humour and humanity than in depicting a familiar future history Robinson has explored more potently before ... at the same time as it is robust and original, as it can be at its best, it is, at its worst, weak and dreadfully derivative. And coming as it does from Kim Stanley Robinson, a visionary voice in the genre if ever there was one... that dearth of delight and insight is Red Moon’s most frustrating facet.
As with the AI in Robinson’s Aurora, [the AI in Red Moon] becomes an intriguing character in its own right, increasingly talking to itself as it tries use its almost limitless access to data in order to master something resembling consciousness ... Between the AI and Ta Shu, we learn a good deal about the development, infrastructure, and politics of the moon colonies, but in general Robinson isn’t as interested in such details as, say, Ian McDonald in his Luna series or John Kessel in The Moon and the Other ... [Robinson's] inhabited moon seems less a frontier than a refraction of ideological, social, and environmental anxieties that are with us now.
Robinson plays his own variations on the theme, turning what might have become a been-there-done-that retread into something fresh and exciting. Another stellar effort from one of the masters of the genre.
While the lunar landscape is a source of beautifully described detail and the lower gravity acts as obstacle and asset, this is not a hard sci-fi novel. Rather, it’s a political thriller where the moon is a backdrop and game piece ... A white man writing about Chinese politics and mainly Chinese characters could seem questionable in a publishing milieu that still lacks sufficient diverse voices; all one can say is that as per usual for Robinson, it seems well-researched ... Not Robinson’s strongest work, but not without interest, either.
Disappointing ... focus remains on projecting those countries’ economic and political futures back on Earth rather than on exploring the implications of extraterrestrial human societies ... Their narrow escapes become repetitive, and neither character is well-developed, while Robinson’s speculations about a future for blockchain governance are interesting but not well integrated into the plot. This dry work is didactic and unremarkable.
