Tag Archives: @hg47

Daughter Moon

Book Review: Daughter Moon, by @hg47

Daughter Moon, by the mysterious @hg47. I for real bought this one. It wasn’t even free on Amazon. 

I normally start with a description of the book, but Daughter Moon has a ridiculously long (though accurate) synopsis which can be found here. I’ll sum it up by saying that an ace hacker is sent on a suicide mission to save a techno-goddess stranded in time. Then is forced to face an alien invasion, political infighting, and a whole horde of nanobots…not to mention a planet of horny virgins.

Review:
Oh wow, this is some serious hard sic-fi right here. I might even stretch it to speculative fiction. Either way it covers a lot of ground, from Dworkin’s `all sexual penetration is rape’ to Newtonian physics and functional nanotechnology…not to mention time travel. This book takes some thought to read though. I strongly recommend reading it, but not when there are too many distractions about. It would be easy to get lost in the multiple time-lines and overlapping ‘Direct Interface Lifetimes.’ You want time available to think through the information presented to you and appreciate the detailed science that the story is interlaced with. A lot of research must have gone into the technical writing. Whomever @hg47 is in real life, he/she has no shortage of education. (Unless he/she is just a simple genius. You never know.) The bibliography (yea there is one) kept my internal social scientist happy and lit my physicist husband’s eyes aglow.

But it’s also funny, though in a subtle kind of way. For example, a discussion of the works of Kate Gödel (a feminized reference to famed physicist Kurt Gödel) while the villainized Einstein got to keep his masculinity….Spielberg and Shakespeare, well maybe. I also found it endlessly amusing to spot all of the future huwomanity’s idolizations of famed feminists: the Shere Hite shuttle, Simone de Beauvoir museum, Andrea Dworkin and Avital Ronell ships, classic…or would undoubtedly be for a race of socially superior women. The use of feminized language (huwomanity, womanoeuvred, etc) did take some getting used to, but it works.

If you like your Sci-fi with a hard edge this is the book for you. The writing reminded me a lot of Heinlein with a little Douglas Adams humour thrown in for good measure. Some of the AIs even reminded me of Marvin at times. Seriously, if you’re into the genre pick it up.