Frederik Pohl’s Danger Moon (Red Moon of Danger)

Frederik Pohl’s science fiction short novel Danger Moon was published in 1951. A variant of the story with the title Red Moon of Danger appeared under the name James MacCreigh.

Frederik Pohl (1919-2013) was an American science fiction writer and one of the major figures in the genre.

Steve Templin is a kid of interplanetary explorer. He’s just been offered a job by Ellen Bishop as a troubleshooter for a company called Terralune. They’re having a lot of trouble in their uranium mine on the Moon. Maybe there’s sabotage. Maybe it’s highly organised. Templin has to eliminate the problem.

Templin had been one of the first astronauts to land on the Moon, a decade-and-a-half earlier. He knows Ellen Bishop well. She’s the daughter of another space exploration pioneer. He isn’t keen on this new job but he’ll do it out out of respect for her late father, and out of respect for Ellen.

He very quickly has a run-in with man named OIcott. Olcott is very rich and very powerful. Templin encounters hi in Hadley Dome. Templin doesn’t approve of Hadley Dome. It’s the pleasure capital of the Moon. The normal laws don’t apply on the Moon. The pleasures of the flesh are freely available. And gambling. Especially gambling. Gambling is a big thing in Hadley Dome. Templin disapproves of decadence and lawlessness.

When he gets to the mine it’s obvious that there’s something peculiar going on. Sabotage certainly, but maybe something more. Maybe something connected to the Moon’s past. It might be the distant past or the recent past. The lunar colony had rebelled a few years earlier. Earth had been attacked. Cities on Earth had been nuked.

A mine shaft collapses. Seven of the eight men working the shaft escape safely. The odd thing is, there could not have been eight men there.

There’s also the attempt to kill Templin.

This is essentially a potboiler. Its biggest problem is that it’s not pulpy enough. A more pulpy approach would have worked better. There’s not enough substance here for a serious science fiction novel. There is the basis for a fun tale of adventure and mayhem but Pohl isn’t willing to embrace that approach fully.

Pohl does display a degree of knowledge of conditions on the lunar surface that was as accurate as one could be in 1951. This is a novel in which the low gravity plays a part, as do the temperature differentials between lunar day and lunar night and the hazards of working on an airless planet.

In 1951 both nuclear power and nuclear weapons were highly topical and both play a part.

Mercifully there’s no politics. The bad guys are motivated by plain old lust for power and money rather than ideology.

Steve Templin is pretty much a stock-standard square-jawed action hero. Ellen Bishop isn’t developed enough as a character to be a memorable heroine.

It’s a short novel with a fairly straightforward plot, with just a few minor twists.

Danger Moon is by no means a bad novel but it doesn’t have anything special going for it. It’s worth a look but it’s not in the same league as Pohl’s brilliant 1953 collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants, or his slightly later and very entertaining A Plague of Pythons.

This novel is published in an Armchair Fiction two-novel paperback edition, paired with Ralph Milne Farley’s 1939 science fiction novel The Hidden Universe.