Red Moon

Red Moon is a science fiction novel by the American writer Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 2018 and set in China and on the Moon.

The story takes place in 2047, when the Moon has a Chinese settlement with the politics of a company town and Earth has an economy and a government that are being reshaped by new technology, including the quantum communications device Fred is delivering. Robinson writes the investigation as a thriller — a man held on suspicion of murder, a printing of events he cannot recall, a chase that runs from Beijing to the lunar surface — and uses the pursuit to look at a society from the inside, since the people chasing him are not the villains of a conspiracy but members of an administration that has decided what has to be kept quiet. Freddie, the journalist, has been a celebrity because he explains the world simply, and the woman he helps to escape has become the figurehead of a movement by having written about the workers and migrants displaced by the changes. The novel was Robinson's first set largely in China, and its reviews were mixed, which the author said did not surprise him.