3 Hard Shots at the Moon

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Look what came in the mail! 3 Hard Shots at the Moon is a signed and numbered limited edition (300 copies) hardcover containing three hard-sf novellas set on the Moon. It contains John Kessel's "Stories for Men," Ian McDonald's "The Menace from Farside," and my own "Griffin's Egg," along with an introduction by James Patrick Kelly. With a cover and full-color interior illustrations by Maurizio Manzieri.

Also available in paperback and e-book formats from the publisher, Infinivox. You can find their page with complete information about the book--and Manzieri's interior illustrations--here.

And since I have the opportunity to talk about it . . . 

"Griffin's Egg" was originally published in hardcover format by Century/Legend in Britain in 1991. The triggering incident for the novella is a nuclear war on Earth that leaves its Lunar research colony isolated. At the time I was writing, it only made sense that such a war would be a confrontation between East and West--between the USSR and the United States, essentially. Only...

That was a war that SF writers had been predicting since shortly after Hiroshima. The very thought of it bored me. So I created a conflict whose origins were obscure and which no one really understood. The ideologies involved were of no relevance to the story anyway, so why not? And between the time I wrote the story and when it came out in print, a funny thing happened...

The Soviet Union collapsed.

It happened very suddenly, essentially because the people of East Germany were as bored by the East-West Cold War universe as I was. (I oversimplify greatly; feel free to read a few books of history.) If I had gone with the conventional wisdom of the times, "Griffin's Egg" would be painfully dated today. But because I didn't, the future I imagined is still conceivably one we might have.

There's a lesson to be learned here, but I'm not sure I can put it into words. Other than that it's usually better to imagine things differently than everybody else does.

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