Rabbit In The Moon by Fiona Moore

Publisher - Epic Publishing

Published - Out Now

Price - £15.99 paperback £3.99 ebook

Ken Usagi, a daring young journalist from the icy wilderness of Nunavut, is thrust into a perilous journey through the war-ravaged remnants of the former United States. Haunted by a chilling encounter with a mysterious biotechnical machine-a relic from his troubled childhood-he becomes convinced it holds the key to ending the devastating conflict tearing the world apart.

Far to the south, Totchli, a brilliant young biotechnician from a Mesoamerican society pummeled by catastrophic climate change, receives a desperate order. He must venture north to uncover the fate of a critical colonial expedition, a mission that once carried the last hopes of his people's survival. Communication channels with the expedition have fallen eerily silent.

As Ken and Totchli embark on their separate quests, the very fabric of reality begins to unravel. Their paths converge, leading to a fateful encounter where the boundaries of their worlds blur and shatter.

In a race against time, with the fate of two worlds hanging in the balance, Ken and Totchli must navigate a web of secrets, dangers, and cosmic forces that threaten to consume everything they hold dear. Can they unite to save their shattered worlds, or will they be forced to watch as everything they know and love is destroyed?

Science Fiction is often talking about the end of the world and we have to consider what that is really saying about being human. Yes we are increasingly aware that we are on asteroid, earthquake or amazing SFX away from destruction but also our more personal view of the world ends a lot more than we think which can be due to war, disease, a proto-dictator being elected or an extremely unfair legal decision. What we are used to gets shattered and we have to live in a world that no longer feels familiar, one that can be now more dangerous, crueller and unpredictable. No wonder we feel on edge all the time as we wonder what is next? In Fiona Moore’s science fiction novel Rabbit In the Moon we follow two men travelling in a much changed Americas on similar quests but seeing the world very differently.

Ken Usagi is a journalist formally of Toronto but as child when that flooded he moved to the not quite now frozen land of Nunavut. As a child a mysterious encounter with something that resembled a large rabbit/machine made him always look out for similar stories and that has led him to being embedded into the military as a journalist as the remnants of the former states fight for the remaining viable land. He is discovering those machines are real and have a much stranger purpose.

Totchli lives in the south a much changed mesoamerican inspired civilisation that is trying to harness the world even with the many effects of climate change. He is selected to seek out a missing science mission with a small group and they find a much stranger event than they expected has taken place. These two searching parties are ever nearing each other

This was an interesting story to read. We have two quest style narratives and yet from. Dry different perspectives. Ken’s story resembles a Vietnam style military quest ( the book does pay tribute at the start to Apocalypse Now) and we have a fascinating world massively impacted by climate change, war and now strange biomechanical hybrids impacting the local animal population making them more dangerous and also explosive. Each of the chapters shows us how hard life is with young people being pulled towards the ideas of leaving the few remaining towns and living a much more basic life. At the same time soldiers fight as that is what they do and the cold cruelty of war comes across. While some of feels the same it’s also has hints of a world to come more diverse and possibly even human modified.

Totchli’s story is similar but with much more of a scientific bent and the new mesoamerican style culture we meet is not something many will have seen before. A very different culture and approach to life has evolved in a fracturing climate and yet we also get a biomechnical threat which makes the reader start to see the joins of the two stories and wonder where they’re heading.

For me the issue is while both stories are interesting with lots of world building and we get to know our two main characters well there is a lack of pace. Each story doesn’t feel for me to build too much towards the bigger narrative so when we do get there is was more of a reaction of ‘that is interesting’ more than being very wowed or feeling this was where we were always going to get too and in a relatively short novel that lack of pace and scale felt it was holding the story back.

Rabbit In The Moon is an interesting take on the world ending and has a unique spin on it that is well worth a read and I am very interested in how Moore develops further in their novels as I have very much enjoyed their short stories. Definitely worth a look!