Author David S. Michaels Comments:
Red Moon is the result of my fascination with the Soviet space program. The notion of firing men into space crammed into low-tech contraptions such as Vostok has always struck me as appealingly Jules Vernian. When I was in high school, I did an expository speech on Russian cosmonauts. I even wrote to the Soviet Embassy for information. They responded with this big package of propaganda, which I’m sure landed me on an FBI list!
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Co-Author Daniel Brenton Remembers: Red Moon began in my heated thirteen year old imagination as I followed the flight of Apollo 11. Being an adolescent in 1960’s small town Indiana, it was almost natural to regard the flight of Luna 15 with almost Nativist suspicion — `what are those damned Ruskies up to,’ that sort of thing. A few years later we moved to Utah and I met Dave. Fueled by the chemistry of our mutual interest in space, I cooked up a little short story that Luna 15 had been a last ditch attempt by the Soviets to beat us to the Moon. I’ve long since lost the story, but it stuck with Dave over all those years. |
The inspiration for Red Moon came from a short story called “Sea of Crises,” written by my close friend, Daniel Brenton, when we were both at Olympus Junior High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1973. That story postulated that Luna 15, a mysterious Soviet space probe that crashed into the lunar surface even as Armstrong and Aldrin were kicking up Moon dust, was actually a last-ditch manned spacecraft attempting to beat Apollo 11 to touchdown. Dan shared my fascination with space flight and hard SF, particularly the work of writers like Martin Caidin and Arthur C. Clarke. We used to kick around a lot of ideas for SF short stories and novels back then. Dan was (and is) a gifted writer whose talent goaded me to hone my own craft. After high school, our families moved to different parts of the country, mine to the southern California desert, Dan’s to Arizona. We kept in touch and neither of us gave up our dreams of deep space.
A couple of decades of Real Life intervened as each of us found career paths and started families (see above). It was in my role as ancient coin dealer that I attended a Sotheby’s auction in New York in December, 1993 and wandered into the basement. I was stunned to find a bunch of Soviet space hardware being prepared for sale! Looking at this incredible cache brought back my old fascination with Soviet space flight. I ran into a bald, thickset little man and asked him, “excuse me, sir, but is that REALLY Alexei Leonov’s spare EVA suit?” And he said, “Da– I am he. I am Alexei Leonov.” Leonov, in 1965, was the first man to walk in space, and a personal hero of mine.
Inspired, I contacted Daniel Brenton and suggested we develop his old short story into a screenplay. For some reason, the name Red Moon popped into my head and it stuck. I was at the time attending a writing workshop in Fresno. I pitched our outline to my screenwriting teacher, Pam Wallace, who co-authored the film Witness. She said, “why am I supposed to care about the Moon Race? That was 20-odd years ago, and the Cold War is over.” So I came up with the 2019 story line involving a return to the Moon and a search for the “Mother Lode,” a cache of lunar ice that could solve the world’s energy crisis, which we wrapped around the 1969 Soviet account. This was too “big” for a screenplay, so I started writing it as a novel in late ‘97, with Dan giving ongoing feedback and writing several of the novel’s closing chapters. I also received a lot of inspiration and encouragement from my novel writing workshop, run by a great lady named Elnora King.
About midway through the project, I landed Natasha Kern of Portland, OR as my literary agent. Natasha became an enthusiastic booster of Red Moon, and shopped it around extensively once I completed the manuscript in April of ‘99. With the publishing industry in the midst of a major crisis, we suffered a number of heartbreaking near-misses. Ultimately, Natasha decided to form her own publishing imprint to release worthy books that were getting passed over amid the panic and paralysis clutching “traditional” publishing. After it appeared on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers, Red Moon had a long, gratifying run of success, several times bubbling well up on national sales rankings, but did not receive the attention of of the publishing industry as all of us had hoped. This initial version of Red Moon has since gone out of print, and Natasha Kern and I have parted ways.
Enter Jeff Edwards. Jeff is a radio personality and book reviewer for KMVX/Mix-103 Radio in Twin Falls, Idaho, and became one of our most enthusiastic (and vocal) fans. In early 2007, a chance meeting between Jeff and Jeremy Robinson, publisher of Breakneck Books, resulted in Jeremy contacting me about publishing a new edition.
While it carries our names as authors, I want to emphasize we both received invaluable help from Mark Wade, the author/developer of the Internet Encyclopedia Astronautica. Mark, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the Soviet program, actually worked out the technical details of the Firebird mission to the Moon. (See “The Reality Behind the Mystery of Luna 15,” which includes a gallery of his detailed illustrations.)
I am confident you’ll enjoy Red Moon. It’s a big, sprawling epic of mankind’s onetime obsession with exploring space, an obsession we need to regain if our species is going to survive.
