Book Review: A Moon Full of Stars by Jon Mollison

I started my 2018 with a bang, reading Jon Mollison's A Moon Full of Stars. Jon is a novella writing, pulp revolution spreading, machine, whose writing seems to get better and better with each piece.

I've read some of Jon's shorter work which you can find in Storyhack Magazine and through his website JonMollison.com. But A Moon Full of Stars was the first longer work and I was not disappointed.

Moon Full of Stars is an action-packed post-apocalyptic piece of insane pulp filled with pig-faced biker mutants, tribal hunters, rocket ships, artificial intelligence, low gravity warped psychic puritans, and some really weird centaurs.

It's an adventure story about two young rival hunters forced to band together on a quest to rescue their people from the clutches of mutant slavers. In the tradition of radiation-pulp and roleplaying games like Gamma World, our heroes must work together to overcome difficult and monstrous obstacles and maybe find love along the way.

The short novella format, abandoned in the past decades, suits this style of fast and frantic action. Jon manages to build a fully developed world populated with compelling characters in the same amount of space that more celebrated fantasy writers would use to describe a meal or a character's dress.

Pick up Moon Full of Stars, have a beer or two and enjoy the fun work of a writer who loves the Science Fantasy classics and the games inspired by them.