1987 Bodley Head paperback, cover art by Nick Bantock

Louise Lawrence’s 1986 YA Moonwind is something of a thematic sibling to her earlier novels Star Lord and Earth Witch, and though it’s ostensibly SF, it’s better read as a fable or fantasy that uses the backdrop of space and technology to heighten its themes. (Perhaps a better description might be New Age SF, considering its allusions to ancient Atlantis, humans being partly descended from aliens, and the idea that aliens are more like spiritual beings than bug-eyed monsters.)

It starts with a spaceship being forced to land on a barren moon for repairs. For some reason, only junior technician Bethkahn is left onboard to assess the damage (and to discover there’s one thing she can’t repair), while the rest of the crew take a secondary craft to the nearby blue planet. Landing on an island, that craft is destroyed when a volcano erupts, leaving Bethkahn isolated, alone, and unable to take off. The ship’s computer suggests she enter suspended animation, from which it will wake her when the situation changes. And it does, ten thousand years later, but with alarming news: the formerly primitive people of that nearby planet have developed technology, and are now visiting their moon. Bethkahn takes one look at these lumbering, space-suited creatures, and immediately dismisses them as “Cavorting imbecile monsters!” The ship fears that, when the creatures find it, they’ll take it apart to see how it works, and Bethkahn will be stranded in this primitive system forever. The pair watch for developments.

The story then switches to seventeen-year-old Gareth Johns from Aberdare (yes, that blue planet was Earth all along), co-winner of a World Educational Council essay-writing competition, for which he’s won a month-long visit to the US moonbase. His essay, titled “The Lunacy Syndrome” is about how there are dwindling congregations of church-goers on Earth, but “go to the Moon and you come back converted”. The Moon, he thinks, is “where science and religion finally meet”: “God is alive and well and living on the Moon.”

1986 US cover from Harper and Row

The other prize-winner is Californian Karen Angers, whose essay is on how the Moon has always been characterised, poetically and mythically, as female: Phoebe, Diana, and the White Goddess. Reading it, Gareth is unprepared for what he considers the “loud-mouthed and gawky” young woman who wrote it, who gets things off between them to a bad start by, first of all, referring to him as English—he’s the “first Welshman on the Moon”, after all!—and by constantly calling him Gary. But underlying this clash are differences of class (Gareth’s home town is poor, and he feels little hope about his own future, or that of the world, whereas Karen’s parents are obviously well-off), and of temperament. Gareth has come to the base expecting to “feel the Moon’s almighty desolation and catch the wonder”; sunny Karen seems to have just come to photograph everything, and Gareth feels she’s turned what ought be an awesome and even spiritual experience into a tourist trip.

Bethkahn, meanwhile, realises she has a chance of escape. If she can sneak into the moonbase, she can use their tools to fix her ship’s broken stabiliser and take off. But how to enter the base without being detected? She does have, it turns out, a means of doing so. Because Bethkahn, and the rest of her people, are non-corporeal; they are “spirit”, not flesh. But in order to do the work on the stabiliser she’s going to need to use a physical body, somehow, and the easiest way seems to be “spiritual possession”: she will enter a person’s body, take it over for a while, get the work done and leave. But her first attempt ends in disaster. She tries to enter a lunar buggy to possess the driver, but because the driver, lazily, left the internal airlock door open, all she succeeds in doing is killing him. Her next, more careful, attempt drives her intended possessee mad. She realises she needs, not a body to use, but an ally. And there’s only one person this can be: Gareth, who has discovered one of her ship’s spy modules but has kept quiet about it. He, she realises, might be someone she can trust. (And he already has a hint she exists. Just before the disaster with the moon buggy, he and some others saw a cloud of moon dust, driven by what, despite there being no atmosphere, seemed like a wind—a moonwind—and inside it, he thought he saw a young woman.)

US paperback cover

I’m sure the more hard-SF type of reader will already have noticed what appears to be a massive logical hole in this set-up. Bethkahn is non-corporeal, yet she had to open the moon buggy’s door to get in, which is why the driver was killed. It turns out she always has to open a door to get into anywhere. It also turns out she can carry physical objects—the damaged stabiliser is one such object—even though it seems she can’t handle the tools she’d need to use to fix it. (This despite being an engineer on a spaceship that surely at some point needs tools to fix its other components. And why does she need a physical spaceship at all if she’s non-corporeal?) In one scene, Gareth hands her a plastic bag containing the spy module he discovered, and she walks off with it; but when Gareth tries to touch her, his hand goes right through. Bethkahn’s non-corporeality, it seems, is there to first of all create a plot difficulty (how to fix the stabiliser), and secondly to underline the core theme of the book: loneliness.

Bethkahn has spent ten thousand years on the moon, and though she has her ship’s computer for company, “It was not enough that the starship cared for her. She needed a person… a voice, a smile, another living being beside herself.” Gareth, meanwhile, has already been warned that one of the main perils of this harsh environment isn’t its lack of atmosphere, but that “Solitude can be dangerous on the Moon”, because “here on the Moon was a loneliness that terrified, a monstrous isolation.” When he comes to know Bethkahn, he immediately grasps the poetic meaning of her nature:

“She’s non-corporeal, see? A ghost… stranded here… wandering. My God, there’s loneliness for you.”

Gareth is equally lonely, in a way. He’s hopeless about his life at home (“a decaying industrial nation, closed-down coal mines and acid rain and small chance of getting employment”), and doesn’t fit in with the mostly cheery Americans on the base. When Karen suggests he come to Santa Barbara where her dad can help get him a job, he bursts out:

“There’s nothing anywhere! No reason! No purpose! … There’s no memory on Earth. Here’s where the meaning began. Here! I want to go on, not back…”

Bethkahn, though, offers him an alternative: leave with her. Only, to do so, he has to become, like her, non-corporeal, which in human terms means dying. Moonwind is, at times, a stark narrative, about not just loneliness, but the way loneliness only increases the difficulties between people. Bethkahn’s inexperience in dealing with physical humans leads to one death and one madness; Gareth, on the other hand, is always getting in trouble with Karen and the other people on the base thanks to his oscillating between a spiky resentment of their generally happy dispositions, and his own rather disruptive sense of humour. In her essay on the moon goddess, Karen wrote that “loneliness makes her cruel”, and that certainly seems the unintentional effect of both Bethkahn’s and Gareth’s isolation.

Louise Lawrence

As with Lawrence’s Star Lord, the alien in Moonwind is a more advanced, more spiritual being, but one with a slight coldness to it. The closer parallel, though, is with Earth Witch, which is also about a troubled Welsh lad getting into a relationship with a woman who’s part human, part mythical entity. In all three, Lawrence takes her stories as close to tragedy as she can with a Young Adult audience, while leaving a little space at the end for something like a positive ending.

Moonwind was adapted for TV, though in mini-format. It was shown as part of ITV’s Book Tower magazine programme, in eight episodes from 8th January 1987 to 19th February (4:50p.m. on Thursdays). The Book Tower was itself only a half-hour (minus adverts) programme featuring book reviews and story readings as well as its drama serial, but even if each episode of the adaptation was only 10 minutes long, that could still make for a short feature-length film in total, which would be interesting to see. The only thing I’ve been able to find, though, is one picture of some of the cast:

Kevin Francis as Gareth, Andrea Milton as Karen, and Richard D Sharp as Drew