The Third Moon
The Story
Where does the past end and the future begin?
Haunted by inherited memories of his peoples’ dispossession and theft of their children, Warrain is just twelve years old when the nightmare repeats. But Warrain is not living on Earth in the 21st Century; he is living on the planet Imago in the far-flung future.
Five years before, Station One’s Mech’s got high on the opioid arrash and, in the bloodshed that followed, Warrain’s scientific community were expelled from the Station, his father murdered, and his mother and unborn sibling lost to him.
The scientists carve out a second rudimentary Station high in Imago’s ranges and Warrain’s friends get on with their lives. Not Warrain; he climbs the Tors to stare down at Station One, dream of his mother and sibling, and plot revenge.
And then one day, everything changes. A third moon appears in the sky, one of Imago’s life-forms calls him by name, and disease breaks out at Station One.
When the Mechs visit to seek help for their ill, Warrain seizes the opportunity to deal them a blow they will never forget.
But the third moon brings changes that threaten them all and, to aid the life-form whose kind is being dispossessed and slaughtered, he must turn his back on the hate that has long sustained him, and find another way to live.
The Idea
The Third Moon is the result of three ideas, two of which had been rattling about in my head a very long time. One of these came from an episode of Dr Who (when Jon Pertwee was the Dr). In the episode, an insect-like creature changes into an angel-like human. I found the episode moving because, like the Dr, I had assumed the creature was one thing, when it was something else entirely.
The second long-running idea was to write a story from the viewpoint of the vanquished (not the more common viewpoint of the victors) and to have the bitter defeat ultimately turn out to be an advantage. The third more recent idea sprang from my interest in inherited memories, an aspect of the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung's investigation of the collective unconscious.
When I was tricked into my first NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) by colleagues (who did not complete their projects!) I decided to finally explore these three ideas. The Third Moon turned out to be my first story with a male hero and my first story told from a first person viewpoint.
The Secondary World
The story is set in the far future on an earth-like planet called Imago. The interplanetary settlers are selected by matching their expertise to the planet’s resources which, one way or another, are exploited by Earth. At the time of the story, no communication or ships have arrived from Earth for many, many years.
The settler ships carry two very different populations. As well as the highly educated scientists, physicists, chemists, botanists and so on, they carry the mechtechnicians who assemble and maintain the pods that make up the Stations. It is a one-way ticket for both groups of settlers who are accompanied by their families.
While Imago is earth-like, it has some quirky differences. As well as its two moons, it has the argent-owl which, by shining like a moon, fools its prey. Its larger animals include a six-legged, grub-like creature, pejoratively known as a maggot, and the savage shadcat (shadow cat) similar to a hyena. Vegetation includes a range of lichens, and forests of stone-hard timber that metabolise so slowly they do not appear to change at all.
The Music
The Third Moon was not written to music, but given the main characters are Australia’s First Nation people, didgeridoo music is a good fit. (The didjeridu is a wind instrument made of a hollow trunk or branch.)
Deep Fantasy
The key motif in the story is Warrain’s rite of passage to adulthood. Unlike his friends, who carve out purposeful lives for themselves, Warrain remains angry and frustrated by the death of his father and loss of his mother and unborn sibling, and unable to move on.
Killing (in self defence) results in the scarification of initiation on his cheeks, but no transition to adulthood takes place until he commits to aiding the maggot (the planet’s sentient life-form). The arduous and dangerous quest to deliver the maggot to her destination and allow her transformation, also allows his. And, as he gazes down at a planet which is also transformed, he at last understands and accepts his place on it.
Happy reading.