3 Hard Shots at the Moon. edited by Allan Kaster. 2025
3 HARD SHOTS AT THE MOON
RATED 100% POSITIVE. STORY SCORE 4.7 OF 5
3 STORIES : 2 GREAT / 1 GOOD / 0 AVERAGE / 0 POOR / 0 DNF
A small book of novellas is walking a tightrope. With only a few stories, and each story taking nearly 100 pages, they better all be good. You don’t want a reader skipping over one third of the book. Thankfully, Allan Kaster doesn’t have that problem. He has selected three diverse and very good novellas in this special volume. The stories cover three decades of modern moon fiction and feature reprinted stories from masters of science fiction.
Full Disclosure: I’m a fan of Kaster’s editing and spent time with him at WorldCon in Chicago on year. I was a Kickstarter supporter of this book and received the signed hardcover with beautiful illustrations by Maurizio Manzieri. See the illustrations on the Infinivox website. Buy the book or ebook here.
Other Review of Allan Kaster Anthologies
Two of the Three Stories make the All-Time Great List
But as that is more than half the stories in the book, it makes more sense to invite you to find them below.
3 HARD SHOTS AT THE MOON
3 STORIES : 2 GREAT / 1 GOOD / 0 AVERAGE / 0 POOR / 0 DNF
Griffin’s Egg • (1991) • novella by Michael Swanwick
Great. Hard edged SF. Weapon manufacturing for earth has been transplanted to the moon., along with even more dangerous science that rewrites the human brain. Eventually the wars of earth flare up to an extreme level and that spills onto the moon. Suspenseful, exciting, smart.
Stories for Men • (2002) • novella by John Kessel
Good. “They couldn’t write this kind of science fiction today.” A young man in a matriarchal Moon colony starts to feel that men are being oppressed. This comes about through reading a book full of stories of masculinity that he cannot fully grasp and his association with a rebel named Tyler Durden. Yes, this is a story written only a few years after the release of Fight Club and featuring a very similar character with the same name. Was this intentional, or did Kessel get the name and vibe stuck in his head because of the movie?
The Menace from Farside • (2019) • novella by Ian McDonald
Great. A fabulous young-adult science fiction adventure full of a supreme sense of wonder. A teenage girl living on a moon colony is jealous of her ‘new sister’s beauty and confidence. As a way of reasserting her dominance, she leads a group of four people across the surface of the moon to get selfies with Neil Armstrong’s first footprint on the moon. It is a story full of unground habitats, merciless raiders, sublunar colonies, terrifying radiation storms, and a strange Ring of marital connections that is crazy complicated, even for those who live in it.
