Review: Over the Moon

Over the Moon by S.E. Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Inspired by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , but in a space-opera setting. Rewrites of classic stories are hit or miss for me; this one mostly hit, with decent character work and a plot that doesn't rely too closely on its original.

The Dorothy character, Dora, has been raised on a corn-farming moon a long way from anywhere, told by her Aunt Emery and Uncle Wae that she is an illegal clone of the princess of the settled galaxy. She escapes danger in a ship that, flying automatically, crashes on and kills a technowitch, the daughter of the great mage, and must travel to see the mage in order to take him his daughter's locket and hopefully obtain a way to return home (where her family may be in danger).

Accompanying her are a woman with no memory who's been used by one of the other technowitches as a scarecrow while still in cryonic suspension; an apparently conscious AI; and a genetically engineered, lion-like super-soldier. Also Tau, Dora's pet mini AI, which she's constructed with her self-taught engineering skills, filling the Toto role.

There are plenty of antagonists along the way, which the group struggle against with courage and resourcefulness. The pacing, for me, was fine. There are several twists to the plot, too, which raise the stakes for Dora and end up setting up for a sequel.

There were occasional challenges to my suspension of disbelief. Not just the usual space-opera nonsense (easier to leave earth than fix it, lost the way back, wormholes AND cryonic suspension, single-biome planets, technology that's advanced in some areas (humanlike AI) but old-fashioned even by today's standards in others (printed books), technologically advanced genius engineers working almost alone in a location remote from the centre of things); at one point the super-soldier, carrying the rest of the group, climbs up a space elevator without a spacesuit in a time period that seems to be measured in, at most, tens of minutes, rather than the weeks that climbing any realistic space elevator would take, if that was even possible. (It's not made clear what the gravity is or the size of the bodies concerned, but synchronous orbit, which is where a space elevator needs to be anchored, is typically tens of thousands of kilometers high.) I guess when you're rewriting a children's fantasy that's more than a century old as space opera, a bit of unlikeliness is expected, but I did feel like the space elevator climb pushed it too far.

I read a pre-release version via Netgalley, and it contained a number of typos that spellcheck would not catch, because they were valid words, but not the words the author meant; these are particularly challenging for an editor to find, and I expect that some of them will make it into the published version. That, along with the sometimes unlikely details, drags it down to the Bronze tier of my Best of the Year for 2022, but that's still a recommendation, based on the strength of the storytelling.

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