McDonald is getting some serious recognition with this trilogy. The Guardian published a review of Luna: New Moon by Adam Roberts, himself an SF writer of some note.
I'm not sure Dallas is the best comparison; Game of Thrones would be better as McDonald's story has similar depth and quality.As with the physics of the environment, so with the socioeconomics of lunar life. McDonald’s world of lunar colonists is dog-eat-dog, or indeed dog-push-dog-out-of-airlock. Rival families compete to exploit lunar resources: the rich prosper and the majority poor go to the wall. Helium-3 is plentiful, and mining it provides cheap energy for Moon and Earth both. Five family-owned corporations, or “dragons”, dominate, and although they operate within the law, they are all mafia-style organisations. Lunar law is rather looser than earthly varieties: lawyers challenge other lawyers to to-the-death physical combat in open court, possession is much more than nine-tenths of the law, and a general frontier town ethos obtains.The story largely concerns the powerful Corta family, originally from Brazil, ruled by the fierce but dying matriarch Adriana Corta. Her first-born son and heir, Rafa Corta, is a hothead, the Sonny Corleone of the novel; his younger brother Lucas, calmer and a better tactician, is more Michael Corleone. The Cortas are effectively at war with the “Mackenzie Metals” family, originally from New Zealand. After somebody tries to assassinate Rafa with a cyberengineered fly, and when the Cortas snatch a lucrative new mining property from under the noses of the Mackenzies, matters heat up fast. There’s a lot of intrigue, some violence, rather more sex – healthily polymorphous and energetic, this – and all the pleasures of a cut-throat soap opera in space: a sort of Moon-Dome Dallas.
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