When the periphery is central

Hugh C. O’Connell reviews Luna (2015) by Ian McDonald.

McDonald’s worlds, whether grim, hopeful, or — as is often the case — both, feel lived in rather than culturally depleted or used up. At first glance, this appears to be the case in Luna, whose inhabitants are drawn from the peripheral and semi-peripheral sites of Earth’s global economy and whose vibrant global culture intermixes myriad elements including Catholicism and Yoruba orishas, bossa nova bands, 1950s haute couture, Korean corporate structures, and the Hawaiian calendar. [...]

However, having set his last four adult novels in Kenya, India, Brazil, and Turkey, respectively, McDonald has developed a knack for decentering the locations and cultures of the core capitalist nations as the sole progenitors of futurity. Luna builds on this tradition by positioning the lunar colonial periphery as the new center of capitalist production. On Earth, a confluence of energy scarcity, joblessness, global economic disaster, refugee crises, and drug-resistant tuberculosis outbreaks creates the conditions for this shift in sociopolitical relations. The Moon, then — Rhodes’s ultimate colonial periphery and the primordial blank spot on the cosmic map of science fiction’s imperial imaginary — rebounds as the hellish fulfillment of the neoliberal capitalism that has turned moribund on Earth. In a fitting analogy of the combined and uneven development that drives capitalist modernity, Earth becomes the dependent client state for the Moon’s energy and mineral production, while plots are being hatched to potentially sever the Moon from Earth’s political grips entirely.

McDonald’s economically dominant Moon is home to about 1.7 million people, most of whom work for one of five major corporate enterprises known as the Five Dragons. Each of the Dragons is connected to one controlling family and one particular monopoly: The Australian McKenzies control rare-earth metal mining; The Chinese Suns control computer and AI development; the Russian Vorontsovs control space flight operations; the Ghanaian Asamoahs control food production; and finally, the Brazilian Cortas control Helium extraction (the main energy source for the post-oil Earth). Much of the present-time plot focuses on these families’ rivalries and the intermarriages designed to quell rashes of violence between them.