Well, there’s a clue in the title, I suppose, if you know your KSR publication history. Red Mars was succeeded by Blue and Green, and even his Three Californias might have been renamed with the colours, had he the benefit of hindsight. So Red Moon might be followed by Blue and Green, but I don’t know yet.

A coupe of years back, I read Ian McDonald’s Luna, and was very disappointed, both by its Warring Crime Dynasties theme, and by its execution. I wasn’t interested enough to read the sequel. This is the worst possible scenario: when you read an entire book and then realise that not only is it not enjoyable to read, but it also lacks a proper ending.

So I have mixed feelings about Red Moon, which doesn’t pack a proper closure. It leaves things up in the air (or up in the non-air, as someone in the book might say). On the other hand, it was quite enjoyable to read: a good KSR experience, as opposed to one of the bad ones. I enjoyed Aurora, but hated 2312 and avoided New York 2140 because it also had a date in the title.

Aurora, about a generation ship on a mission to discover a new home for humanity, turned out to be really about the generation ship we live upon, the earth, and how we should be doing everything possible to save it as a safe environment in which to live. Similarly, Red Moon is really mostly about the Earth and its economies and superpowers.

The Red in the title refers to the presence of China on the moon, but also the experience of being on the moon when there’s a lunar eclipse: actually being on the surface when the moon appears to be red from the perspective of earth. Which is the trick KSR so often pulls: here you are thinking of things from one point of view, but here’s what it’s like if you put yourself over here and look at it backwards, as it were.

So: Earth, Moon, China, USA. Different perspectives on similar problems. The most telling moment of the novel comes when an American criticises China for being a single Party state, and is told that the market itself, under the yoke of which we all toil, is, effectively, a single party state. You cannot have democracy, equality, reform etc. if you are in thrall to the market.

“I mean America is more of a one-party state than China. It’s entirely ruled by the market. Actually the market is the only party in the world now, or it wants to be. So every nation has to deal with that in its own way.”

“They usually say we have a two-party system,” Fred mentioned.

“Your parties are just factions.”

And in this week, the week in which the always factional UK Labour party splits over Brexit, and the UK Conservative party, as ever, is riven with factions which are completely at odds with each other, you realise that, yes, all of this infighting gives the illusion of a political choice, but as long as free market economics hold sway, it is just an illusion.

So this is a novel about the Moon Illusion. Once more, KSR reminds us that this Earth, this planet, is all we really have, that the great fantasy of colonising the solar system will always come up against the reality. The Moon is a sterile world, no air, no atmosphere: nothing can live there except in a fragile artificial environment, and nobody can survive there without regular supply drops from Earth. All of this is just background: the Moon is like Antarctica, a place where various international groups can collaborate, with regularly rotating personnel. Nobody gets pregnant and has babies there. It’s not a place to settle.

But getting pregnant is what one character, Qi, does, and she turns out to be the catalyst for change: not so much on the Moon as on Earth. She pinballs around, pursued by her enemies, accompanied by Fred, an American engineer working for a Swiss company who has got caught up in an assassination plot. They travel from the Moon to Earth and back again, one step ahead or one step behind. Here, KSR has us thinking about surveillance and privacy and whether it is possible to be truly free. Even in a balkanised surveillance system, people can be tracked: by means of GPS chips, radio signals, facial recognition.

As he did with Aurora, KSR offers one POV which is an AI, programmed to improve its own general intelligence, and therefore pondering what all that means, and trying to parse what it is that people want or need. And it all comes down, in this novel about a sterile world upon which not a single basic human need is met except through dedicated intervention, to things like heat and clean air and water and shelter. All of which brings you crashing down to Earth, because here on this planet, cradle of humanity, and the only place we have to live, there are millions of people whose basic Maslowian human needs are not being met. Why? Because capitalism, because markets.

It’s a bit like William Gibson purporting to be science fiction but actually just about the moral limits of markets: it’s philosophy. Not “our lunar future” but our earthly present. But: it lacks an ending, so a sequel to follow, I would guess.