'Rogue Moon' by Algis Budrys

Another SF Masterwork which didn't impress me very much, though I can see it has some merit and has been influential. Scientists, led by Dr Hawks, are investigating a strange alien artifact on the moon which kills people in grotesque and arbitrary ways. Volunteers explore it using a matter transmitter that creates an almost-identical copy who can go inside to explore a bit before dying, while another copy back on earth remembers what happened and so can try again. The Tom Cruise film 'Edge of Tomorrow' springs to mind, and any other story in which a character dies repeatedly because of some SF gimmick.

The SF aspect of the novel is done reasonably well. Dr Hawks is driven to solve the mysteries of the artifact which kills so indifferently; the machine symbolizes the universe, indifferent to human life. The novel is very much about death: it was originally going to be titled 'The Death Machine'. Characters discuss the deaths of people and the inevitable death of the universe. Cheery stuff.

There is a nice passage describing the artifact:

"Perhaps it's the alien equivalent of a discarded tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it lies across the trail to the beetle's burrow? Does the beetle understand why it is harder to climb to the left or right, inside the can, than it is to follow a straight line? Would the beetle be a fool to assume the human race put the can there to torment it — or an egomaniac to believe the can was manufactured only to mystify it? It would be best for the beetle to study the can in terms of the can's logic, to the limit of the beetle's ability. In that way, at least, the beetle can proceed intelligently. It may even grasp some hint of the can's maker. Any other approach is either folly or madness."

This passage, the sequences set in the artifact, and the novel's bleakness reminded me of Roadside Picnic. As the volunteers explore the artifact using trial and error, passing the bodies of older volunteer-copies, the Stalkers of Roadside Picnic explore the Zones using trial and error, the ruined bodies of earlier stalkers littering the floor. The absent aliens of both novels are indifferent to humanity, and through them we are shown a universe in which humans are tiny and insignificant, grasping at what little knowledge they can.

I preferred Roadside Picnic.

The best I can say about Rogue Moon is that it is an ambitious novel with a great SF concept which is sadly not pulled off very well. A lot of it is just so tedious - I almost gave up on it, but it's a short read so I pushed on. Most of the book is character driven, and the characters are monstrously dull and uninteresting. They spend an awful lot of time making long speeches psychoanalyzing each other and interacting in other extremely boring ways. There's a romantic subplot which is somewhat sweet but really quite unbelievable.

I cannot bring myself to recommend Rogue Moon. The SF concept is good, but there are better novels out there