In love with death: Rogue Moon (1960) by Algis Budrys [Review]

A haunting lunar mystery with deep psychological and philosophical implications.

Rogue Moon is a standalone science fiction novel by the Lithuanian-American author and critic Algis Budrys (1931 - 2008). Today, it is one of the most praised SF novels of the 1960s, and appears on several “best of” lists. 

The story has a contemporary setting. Few know that a mysterious structure of alien origin has been discovered on the far side of Earth’s moon. Extreme steps are taken to explore it. With funding from the United States Navy, Continental Electronics has secretly devised an extraordinary machine which can duplicate matter and transmit it over large distances. Unfortunately, visitors to the lunar structure suffer a terrible fate and only a uniquely qualified man can possibly unlock its mysteries.

While perhaps better known as a prolific critic of SF, Budrys made a major impact with this unique novel, known for its strong characters, profound questions, and extended meditation on death, the self, and transcendence.

The dark side of the moon

A rocket sent to the moon by the United States has photographed an anomalous structure on its dark side. The Cold War is on, and the government is desperate to unlock the mystery before the Soviet Union becomes aware of the situation. Manned spaceflight is years away, and so they turn to a radical solution.

Dr. Edward Hawks is a deeply driven scientist in the employment of the large corporation Continental Electronics. With the support of the US Navy, he has been able to build a working prototype of a machine that can store patterns of matter on magnetic tape, produce duplicates of objects, and transmit the duplicate to a remote location. His goal is to send duplicates of human beings to the moon, so that they can enter and catalogue the anomaly.

While the process works, it is fraught with troubling complications. It transpires that duplicates maintain a kind of psychic link with their originals, even though hundreds of thousands of miles separate the two. Worse, the alien structure is dominated by arbitrary rules - the slightest deviation results in a gruesome death for the duplicate. The original, vicariously experiencing death, is invariably driven insane. 

Hawks realises that only a person who can undergo death repeatedly - over, and over again - while remaining sane can possibly hope to map the structure. He is provided with just such a person: the brash, arrogant daredevil Al Barker. The former soldier’s fanatical determination brings the truth closer, but his is a severely damaged persona. The quest for answers on the moon exposes the perverse psychologies of everyone involved on Earth, and raises unnerving questions about what it is that makes us who we are.

About Algis Budrys

Algis Budrys was born in East Prussia in 1931 and moved with his parents to the United States in 1936. He began publishing SF in 1952, and was well regarded for his short stories, but was never particularly prolific as a writer of fiction. Instead, he was more active as a critic. In 1965, he became a reviewer for Galaxy magazine - at the time edited by Frederik Pohl - and remained in this role until 1971. He later reviewed books for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (or F&SF) from 1975 to 1993. 

Rogue Moon is one of Budrys’ best-known novels, the others being Who? (1958) and Michaelmas (1977). It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1961 and lost to Walter M. Miller Jr’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (somewhat oddly, as that novel was published not in 1960, but in 1959).

The dark side of man

This is a truly striking and unique book. Budrys’ lunar mystery is an engaging hook for the story, and a means for him to explore the novel’s theme. It is exactly that, however - a means to an end, rather than the novel’s focus. Rogue Moon is not primarily about the anomalous structure, or the aliens that must have built it, or their inscrutable intentions. It is about human beings, what drives them, and how they confront death.

Al Barker is a memorable character, a man who has had numerous brushes with death and appears to relish these encounters. It is this quality that allows him to endure being replicated and killed over and over again. James Blish - himself an SF writer and critic - argued persuasively that in fact all of the major characters in Rogue Moon are functionally insane. Barker’s girlfriend Claire, for example, has a pathological need to constantly test, challenge, and needle everyone she meets. Even the outwardly rational Hawks has his issues, not least a desire for scientific truth that overrides everything else in his life.

The scanning, replication, and transmission process devised by Hawks raises a number of philosophical questions. The apparently perfect duplication of a person challenges the notion of what personhood is; the ability of one copy to endure after the demise of another leads us to question the nature of death. If consciousness survives, can one be said to have died at all? The characters in Rogue Moon also weigh the pursuit of knowledge against their own lives. Will they be rewarded for this? Or are the characters suffering and dying pointlessly, victims of some alien joke?

Budrys’ focus remains squarely on his characters, and he keeps the alien artefact in the background - it is not even described or seen at all until the novel’s final act. The tight focus on characterisation and psychology is unusual in an SF novel of 1960, and Budrys denies us the release of easy answers or comforting conclusions. 

Interestingly, the characters and dialogue of Rogue Moon are written in a style which strongly recalls hardboiled crime fiction. The book’s original publisher was Fawcett Gold Medal, which published many novels of that type.

Rogue Moon richly deserves its place of honour in 1960s science fiction. Algis Budrys delivered a genuinely unique novel with a style all of its own, which raises unsettling questions about human nature and, our reckless quest for knowledge, and the possible results of a bid to transcend death.

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• I read the Gollancz SF Classics edition of Rogue Moon, published in April 1987. This series was a precursor to the popular (and ongoing) SF Masterworks.
• In addition to the novel version, a slightly shorter novella version was published in the December 1960 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (or F&SF).
  
• Rogue Moon was a clear influence on Alastair Reynolds’ novella Diamond Dogs (2001), which deals with the exploration of a similar deadly structure on the fictional planet Golgotha.