“Jennifer Hammerpot, the Agnostic Bishop of Southwark, looked at the moon buggy with suspicion.”
If you ask me, and there’s surely a reason people don’t, it’s been far too long since any of us stepped on the moon. Time to take a trip to the future to have another go.
It’s 2171, and Bishop Jennifer Hammerpot has been summoned to the moon to perform the first lunar wedding. However, things haven’t quite gone to plan and it’s now the morning after the first failed wedding instead, and everyone is feeling the after effects of the illegal alcohol that was shared around at the would-be reception. Hammerpot, however, has decided to do some extra work since she’s there, and is looking for evidence that a race called the “Americans” landed on the moon in 1969, an idea which seems impossible now. No one knows for sure after all humanity’s information went digital and then, in 2048, they lost the back up, taking with is most of the records of history and culture prior to that point.
Elsewhere in the Steve Moore moonbase, there appears to be a strange and spontaneous outbreak of free will, something that was decided by law, many years ago, didn’t and couldn’t exist. There’s also a schizophrenic computer system to deal with, and the slight issue of the fact a whole bunch of moon buggies are currently organised in such a way that they’re sending rather a rude message back to Earth. Commander Milk has had it up to here with everything, but if he can’t get everything back under control, everyone on the moon is going to die, and pretty soon at that. All in all, things are not going well.
J. M. R. Higgs has done what many thought impossible and somehow begun to channel the ideas of Douglas Adams once more. Many jokes and concepts could sit quite comfortably within his universe, such as using the non-existence of free will as a legal defence, which is very much like his argument that God can’t exist for purely logical reasons. There’s also a character called Clownshoes Fantastic, which is worth the price of the book in itself. The future of the world is mostly played for laughs, with an America that has entirely locked itself away from the outside world, a trademarked moon, and a new bible written by Richard Dawkins, and yet you still find yourself on board with the surrealism so much that it also feels somehow plausible. Of course we’ll eventually lose all our data, and of course cats shouldn’t be taken to the moon. Although short, the pace is good, and I whipped through it in a weekend, pleased to get some genuine laughs out of a novel, which is harder than you think.
For anyone who loves their space travel silly, this is for you.
Looking for something else? Try my novels, The Atomic Blood-Stained Bus (the story of a cannibal and an ex-god) and The Third Wheel (a comedic alien invasion tale), test yourself with a quiz from my book Questioning Your Sanity, or visit my website and I’ll cultivate you a whole quiz on whatever subjects you like. If you just want more reviews, guide yourself around my blog with the navigation bar and find hundreds of reviews at your fingertips.