Elliot Chibe

Team #3A

Rogue Moon

Algis Budrys

June 1981

Rogue Moon Book Report

Algis Budrys is a well known science fiction author born in East Prussia in 1931. The son of a Lithuanian Consul General in New York, Budrys himself held a captain’s commission in the

Free Lithuanian Army. After attending University of Miami and Columbia University Budrys published his first science fiction story, “The High Purpose”. Budrys published Rogue Moon in

1960 which was nominated for a Hugo award as well as being commemorated into the Science

Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two in 1973. He then went on to win a Solstice Award for his plethora of science fiction novellas and his contribution to the field in 2009. Budrys died in 2008 in his home in Evanston, Illinois from melanoma.

Rogue Moon is a story that follow Dr. Edward Hawks, a US Navy employee, who is contracted to investigate an alien artifact located on the moon. The artifact is a labyrinth of sorts that, given one wrong move, will kill the person who enters it. Many people try to enter the artifact to explore it but few leave alive as they make wrong assumptions and missteps. Hawks

figure out a way to avoid danger when entering the labyrinth by creating clones of himself to enter the artifact and report back a map of what they did up until they were killed. With each surrogate he sends in he gets that much closer to finding a way to beat it.

The technology Hawks uses in the book is known as a matter transmitter. The device scans an individuals body cells in order to clone them to a receiver located on the surface of the moon. The individual on the earth feels, sees, and hears everything that its moon-bound counterpart does. Because of the nature of the device, the individuals who use is are often rattled to the point of insanity after being killed second hand. Because of this Hawks has to find surrogates who are able to sane after their experience in order to receive any useful data from the experiments. He uses two people, Al Barker and Claire Pack, to travel the maze as they seem to be less susceptible to the powers of the alien artifact. Finally, Barker tells Hawks that he is close to finishing this puzzle so he and Hawks both enter it simultaneously. They weave their ways through the maze narrowly avoiding death traps eventually making it to the other side. However, because of the limitations of the matter transmitter they are not able to return to earth. Hawks then runs out of air on the moon and dies while Barker unsuccessfully attempts to be transmitted back to earth despite what Hawk had told him.

Questions

Did the technology in the book have any effect on the society of the book?

The matter transmitter which Dr. Hawk made allowed people to distance themselves from physical injury while not shielding them from the emotions of their surrogate. Aside from this mission on the moon, however, it seems as though the technology had little to no effect on society outside of the Navy’s mission.

Has the technology in the book had any effect on the society of today?

Transportation via teleportation has been on the minds of every young science fiction reader, Star Wars fan, and Star Trek fan at some point in their lives. While we may not be able to “beam” someone to the moon just yet there have been great strides and research done in the

field. The first recorded story of a matter transmitter as described in the book is from Edward

Page Mitchell’s “The Man Without a Body” in 1877. In 2014, Dutch physicists at the Delft

Institute of Technology in the Netherlands had advanced the theory of quantum entanglement significantly which is closely tied with teleportation. while researches are still very far from copying doppelgängers of themselves to the surface of the moon, it looks as thought the technology only dreamed of in Rogue Moon may be closer to reality than we think.