I am trying out a new format on the last book I read, Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon. If I like this format better, I will remove the original post. In case I do just that, warning to readers: there will be spoilers...
Rogue Moon was a Hugo nominee for 1961--the winner for that year was Canticle for Leibowitz, which I hope to return to in a later post. In Rogue Moon, scientist Ed Hawks has figured out how to transmit men to the moon. The lunar explorers have discovered a strange structure that keeps killing them; sometimes over and over. The explorers are all cracking under the strain until Hawks finds someone totally new to send to the moon: Al Barker, millionaire playboy extreme sports junkie. Barker is bound and determined to see the exploration mission through, no matter what the experience costs him.
There are a lot of interesting things going on in this book--and the book itself isn't very long. The story takes place firmly in the grip of the military-industrial complex: Hawks works in a large industrial lab, in tandem with the military (the moon base is manned by space sailors) and supported by government funding. Hawks seems to view himself as both separate from and loftier in view than the providers of the resources for his experimentation. In fact, Hawks is set up very early on as a man gifted with vision beyond his peers and driven to understand the vistas that vision opens up to him. He sees the path laid out before him (and the path of exploration set out before mankind), and has no compunctions about pushing those people around him into place to follow that path. He knows what kind of man he is, and is not afraid to be that man. The clear self-knowledge Hawks displays seems to be the key to puzzle of the strange moon structure.
The structure is a labyrinth--it seems to be a metaphor for exploring and confronting one's true self. The landscape and obstacles appear differently to each explorer, although the perils stay of the same type and in the same places across multiple descriptions. Explorers entering the structure are completely isolated from everyone outside the structure--attempts to record the experience, to transmit descriptions, or to transport objects from within the structure all both fail and result in the death of the attempting explorer. Once you enter, you are on your own until you die, which can (and is) caused by a dizzying range of seemingly innocuous gestures, noises, or circumstances. There is no option except to go forward as best you can until something kills you.
Then you wake up, safely back in the lab on earth--except that you remember being on the moon, exploring the structure, and best of all, dying. I loved this--I doubt it is the earliest treatment of the idea of beaming a person from one place to another but it is one of the earliest I've read. Budrys doesn't sugarcoat the ramifications of breaking a person down into their components and rebuilding at the destination location a brand-new person who remembers being the person who was transmitted from Earth. He points out to the reader that, since the original person is destroyed, there is no way to tell that tiny, seemingly insignificant changes might very well exist between the destroyed original and the new copy. There is no way to tell, and so no use worrying about it. However, since it is dangerous to destroy a person and rebuild them on the moon only to send them immediately into even greater peril, Hawks uses a safeguard: when a man is transmitted, he is transmitted twice, simultaneously. One copy goes to the moon and its death in the lunar labyrinth, and the other goes to another section of the lab on Earth. Although differences in experience almost immediately separate the copies into two distinct persons, Hawks discovers that they maintain some kind of psychic bond. When the lunar copy dies, his memories--including those of his death--revert to and somehow merge with the terran copy. That man, shaken by remembering his own dying, has to come to grips with that recollection enough to describe as best he can what path he took and what he did to cause his own death. Then he faces the option to go right back and do it again.
Here's where Barker comes in--he is in it for the bragging rights. He's built his sense of self-worth on being the toughest and most daring person he knows, and as an indication of his propensity towards self-destruction in the pursuit of that goal, he wears a wooden prosthetic on one leg. He lets other people goad him into danger--in fact, that's exactly how Hawks gets him to start on the lunar mission. Here again we see Hawks' vision--he sees how to get Barker to take the bait at first, and he at least hopes he sees Barker's ability to move past that empty pride to persevere in the face of repeated deaths. Of course, Barker does; bravado and daredevil recklessness wouldn't be enough to get him through the labyrinth.
On the final day, the day Barker will navigate the last section of the maze and reach the other side, Hawks goes to the moon with him. This has clearly been Hawks' plan all along--he needs to see the maze itself, and to be walked through it safely so that he can supervise its dismantling. Hawks' journey is the first time the reader gets to "see" the landscape of the labyrinth--and I have to admit I laughed out loud when Hawks noticed that from within the maze, he can see right through the outside walls of the structure to the rest of the lunar landscape, just as if they aren't there.
I admit I was too caught up in the story to follow through the setup Budrys laid out, but he makes sure you aren't able to escape it: there are already a Hawks and a Barker back on Earth; those men get to continue on in the lives the Hawks and Barker on the moon remember living as their own. Ditto for all of the men manning the lunar base--this is a permanent assignment.
One thing Budrys does fudge a little bit is just when the psychic bond between the copies breaks irretrievably. Hawks tells us that it does eventually break under the weight of differing life experiences, and makes it clear that the brevity of the lunar exploration missions are the reason why the terran counterparts of the lunar explorers remember their explorations. The total trip Hawks and Barker take through the labyrinth takes under ten minutes, and after walking the maze, Hawks deliberately wanders off to die of asphyxiation (apparently the tanks in their spacesuits are meticulously filled just enough...) so that his counterpart can wake and start constructing his maze-destructing team. But the men on permanent lunar assignment are not otherwise addressed, receiving only a brief commendation on their sacrifice for mankind's progress.
When it comes down to it though, that seems to be what it was all about: the confrontation with and deconstruction of the maze was presented by Hawks as a necessary next step in lunar exploration. Since Hawks seems to be our prophet in this story, what I got from him was that man's destiny was waiting for him out in space, and that he needed to stop mucking about, take a good hard look at himself, and go find it. Not every person would make it; some would crack first, or retreat. But ultimately, mankind needed to go find its place in the greater universe.
I expect to revisit the books I've read previously at least in brief, and I've located versions of both of the books I initially couldn't find (and so skipped)--including an earlier Budrys novel, which I am now very interested to read and see if these issues of self-knowledge are a consistent theme. More on those as I get to them, but for now, the library system has found me Harry Harrison's Deathworld (all three volumes together), so that will be next.
