The Moon Is Hell!
Two stories by John W. Campbell Jr., one a lunar survival tale.
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John W. Campbell Jr.'s 1951 collection The Moon Is Hell! contains two tales, one science fiction and one sword and sorcery, and was released by Fantasy Press in a limited run of 4,206 copies. The title story, making its debut here, concerns scientists marooned on the Moon after a crash who rely on their expertise to endure, constructing defenses against meteor showers and generating oxygen from lunar rock. The other story, "The Elder Gods," was a rewrite by Campbell from a piece by Arthur J. Burks, originally printed in the October 1939 issue of Unknown under the pen name Don A. Stuart. While the title sometimes appears without an exclamation point, most editions of the collection include it.
Reception
Reviewer Groff Conklin noted that 'The Elder Gods' was 'actually not among the best of Campbell's work', while the title story was 'a brilliantly circumstantial narrative' and 'first-rate stuff'. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas praised the title piece as 'an extraordinary short novel ... with Defoe's own dry convincing factuality'.
P. Schuyler Miller described the title piece as 'a realistic story of the first men on another world, worked out with an absolute minimum of hokum'. Everett F. Bleiler found 'The Elder Gods' to be 'contrived, derivative, and dull', whereas Lester del Rey called it 'a fine sword-and-sorcery novel, having some of the magic of A. Merritt but a lot more logic in its development'. Basil Davenport praised both stories, the title piece for its 'close attention to scientific accuracy' and the second as 'pure swashbuckling romance'.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: The Moon Is Hell! (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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