Red Moon

by Kim Stanley Robinson

So, yes. We came to the moon mainly to displace our weird collection of problems onto a later time, when other generations will have to solve them. So it has ever been; it’s a standard move in both capitalist and Chinese history.

Beijing, the Grand Canal, the Great Wall—and now the moon. You see the pattern. A pattern which sometimes includes dynastic succession.

Eclipses were fairly common on the moon, Valerie and John were told. The red annular band surrounding Earth was sunlight bending through the atmosphere; this phenomenon explained why people on Earth looking up at a lunar eclipse saw the moon turn a dusky red.

“Red moon!” he said. “Awesome!”

Women on the moon were a minority. Among the Americans they were said to constitute thirty-five percent of the population. On the moon, as elsewhere, that gender balance could feel somewhat like parity, and certainly normal for a situation like this one, with its strong element of construction and engineering.

Computing power was economic power, they said; and economic power was political power.

The Party exists to serve the people. As Mao said, “The people alone are the motive force in the making of world history.”

The Disneyland in Hong Kong would presumably have just such an area in it, featuring Princess Mulan no doubt.

We must try to change this movement from a march to a dance. From revolt to phase change. From bloodshed to singing.

Return to Earth: a journey in the bardo.

You face it, you persevere. You enjoy Earthrise and write poems.

“I hate it! It was always just the usual feudal shit, torture and foot-binding and starvation for the masses.” “But good poetry?” Fred suggested, feeling an urge to contradict her.

Did you know Buzz Aldrin, second man on moon, followed Neil Armstrong’s famous quote about one small step for mankind by jumping to ground and saying That might have been a small step for Neil but for me it was really big! So second sentence spoken on moon was a joke about first sentence. I like that so much. Aldrin was the real intellectual among the Apollos. His brain spin so fast is why they call him buzz.

From the fire, the frying pan looks cool.

“No words, just hopes. My point is, when you are inside something, you can see only parts of it. No one can see all of it. So, I see it from the outside.”

He watched the world sliding below from a consciousness that did not feel like his own. He was history; he was time; he was a buddha; he was his mother, looking back and down. Five thousand years of struggle, and where had it brought them? They were pressed against that day’s crisis, their options as small as a wedge in a crack—no way forward, no way back. What was China now? What had it been, what would it become?

Earth was the land of life and death; the moon was a blank white ball in the sky. Now they were making the moon into something more than that, but what that new thing was he could not make clear to himself; nor he suspected could anyone else.

“The moon makes people moony. We are all lunatics up here, hoping that the world has gone away.”

The fiscal noncompliance campaign was going stronger than ever in America. Markets had crashed, banks had closed to stop depositors from withdrawing amounts beyond what the banks had on hand, and now most of the biggest ones were giving themselves over to control by the Federal Reserve to make themselves eligible for a government bailout, which they all now needed. In effect these banks were being nationalized. Everyone was now trying to understand terms like citizens’ fiscal revolution, cryptocurrencies, especially carboncoin, and blockchain governance. People were also trying to figure out whether these mass actions were going to create real representation.

He had sometimes felt that Winston Churchill’s description of democracy was equally suitable as a description of the Party’s rule in China: the worst possible system, except for all the rest.

But now it appeared that everywhere in the world governments were suffering a crisis of representation. Possibly this was because it was all one system, which one could call global capitalism with national characteristics, each variation around the Earth marked by the remaining vestiges of an earlier nation-state system, but still making together one larger global thing: capitalism. When it came to those national characteristics, China had the Party, the US its federal government, the EU its union; but all were ruled by the globalized market.

“Maybe every new system of government looks crazy when it’s first proposed. Remember how in the eighteenth century people said representative democracy was crazy. They called it mob rule. Said it would never work.”

“I know. But if money as it exists now is just feudalism liquefied, maybe this carboncoin is a try at something better. Maybe it’s the labor theory of value back again, with the labor involved required to be for the good of the biosphere, and the money only good for that labor.”

“All for the people; all relies on the people; from the people and to the people.” Mao Zedong, 1927. “That government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this Earth.” Abraham Lincoln, 1863.

Blockchain governance is an algorithmically assisted direct democracy, or a representative government in which the representatives are in part algorithmic.

If everyone had adequate life support. If the work of human civilization was devoted to biosphere rectification. If their systems of exchange promoted these projects.

“Yottaflops,” Ta Shu repeated. “I like that word. That means very fast?”

When repression exists the people move against it, and nothing can stop us once we start to move. We are the billion, we turn the wheel.

Food, water, shelter, clothing, healthcare, education: these all need to be adequate for everyone alive, before anything else good can happen. The interpenetration of people and planet being so complete as to be determinative of every living thing’s shared fate, meeting basic needs for all the living creatures in the shared biosphere is also required to secure the general health and welfare of humanity and its fellow creatures.

“Like what?” “Return of the iron rice bowl, reform of the hukou system, end of the Great Firewall, rule of law.” Fred said, “Those aren’t that different from what Americans want, are they?” “Maybe not. Maybe it’s a global people’s revolt.” “Or a G2 people’s revolt,” he pointed out. “Right. But that’s enough to swing everything.”

“I hate all that bourgeois shit.” “The Dalai Lama would be feudal shit, right?” “The Dalai Lama is Paleolithic shit. He was the last shaman. I wish we still had him with us, but we don’t. Those times are gone.”

It was simply the way things worked, the way they all came into the world. His electrified calm was as bizarre as all the rest of it—not dissociation, instead an unknown new feeling, filling him right to the skin. They were animals. Mammals in action.