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I picked up a copy of Jack Williamson's 1971 novel The Moon Children at a used bookstore recently.
It's well-plotted, and the narrative voice works, I think: I wish we saw and felt rather than being told about more of the emotions, but the distance is consistent with how the character describes himself and his actions.
The story starts with lunar exploration, with some events that seem improbable even to the characters: Three astronauts report, each with utter certainty, seeing entirely incompatible things, after their ship temporarily loses contact with base; the rescue mission finds them unconscious in their spaceship, with pocketsfull of an odd gritty substance, and the footprints from their brief trip outside the ship are barefoot on their return. Shortly thereafter, all three marry and quickly become fathers of the titular "Moon Children", who aren't quite human. Two of the three are awake for a month at a time, and the third doesn't look human. The first two are precocious, the third slow to develop.
The plot follows the children to adulthood, against the background of solar system exploration and eventual conflict with extraterrestrial lifeforms; the narrator is involved in the children's upbringing and education, as well as in publicity for various space projects, which leaves him with lots of information but reinforces the feeling of being on the sidelines that his father and older brother instilled in him.
The novel doesn't pass scientific plausibility tests: 1971 is late for inhabited Mars and Venus, though the Jovians and Saturnians are more plausible (especially as the Jovians seem to float/fly in their world's atmosphere. The "moon children" themselves are a bit hard to swallow. Somehow, it doesn't matter. Conversely, Williamson's depiction of computers still seems plausible: no specifics of how they're programmed, just a note that most of the people at a meeting are sitting behind "portable computers."
Recommended if you like sf and don't insist on too much rigor (the characters spend much of their energy trying to build a "tachyon beacon," whose design comes from the same grit that makes the moon children what they are, and that grit has been lying on the moon for sixty million years). The book isn't remotely feminist, but neither is it annoyingly sexist: while there aren't many female characters, the ones there are do things and have motives other than catching/keeping a man. (Some of the characters are annoyingly sexist, but the narrator isn't, and I don't get the impression that the author was.)
It's well-plotted, and the narrative voice works, I think: I wish we saw and felt rather than being told about more of the emotions, but the distance is consistent with how the character describes himself and his actions.
The story starts with lunar exploration, with some events that seem improbable even to the characters: Three astronauts report, each with utter certainty, seeing entirely incompatible things, after their ship temporarily loses contact with base; the rescue mission finds them unconscious in their spaceship, with pocketsfull of an odd gritty substance, and the footprints from their brief trip outside the ship are barefoot on their return. Shortly thereafter, all three marry and quickly become fathers of the titular "Moon Children", who aren't quite human. Two of the three are awake for a month at a time, and the third doesn't look human. The first two are precocious, the third slow to develop.
The plot follows the children to adulthood, against the background of solar system exploration and eventual conflict with extraterrestrial lifeforms; the narrator is involved in the children's upbringing and education, as well as in publicity for various space projects, which leaves him with lots of information but reinforces the feeling of being on the sidelines that his father and older brother instilled in him.
The novel doesn't pass scientific plausibility tests: 1971 is late for inhabited Mars and Venus, though the Jovians and Saturnians are more plausible (especially as the Jovians seem to float/fly in their world's atmosphere. The "moon children" themselves are a bit hard to swallow. Somehow, it doesn't matter. Conversely, Williamson's depiction of computers still seems plausible: no specifics of how they're programmed, just a note that most of the people at a meeting are sitting behind "portable computers."
Recommended if you like sf and don't insist on too much rigor (the characters spend much of their energy trying to build a "tachyon beacon," whose design comes from the same grit that makes the moon children what they are, and that grit has been lying on the moon for sixty million years). The book isn't remotely feminist, but neither is it annoyingly sexist: while there aren't many female characters, the ones there are do things and have motives other than catching/keeping a man. (Some of the characters are annoyingly sexist, but the narrator isn't, and I don't get the impression that the author was.)
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