First Mage on the Moon by Cameron Johnston

Cameron Johnston’s First Mage on the Moon delivers what it says on the tin. It is the story of a group of magic users who develop their world’s first space-going vehicle in order to visit the home of the gods on the Moon. It feels in places like a fantasy version of the development of the Apollo mission, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

First Mage on the Moon opens with people attending the execution of Whitlaw Goddard, Chief of the Unity Research and Design Workshop. Goddard has taken full responsibility for a heretical project that sent people to the Moon. The narrative then drops back three years to focus on a group of characters in the Research and Design Workshop who decide that they do not want to work on building better weapons to fuel the war that Unity is engaged in. Rather, their idea is to build a craft that can take mages to the moon, the home of the gods, and ask the gods to intervene in the ongoing war. But because of the focus on the war effort and their source of funding, the group need to carry out the project in secret.

The narrative focusses mainly on the core group of engineers – Ella Pickering, a mage injured in an accident that she was wrongly accused of; Catherine Goddard, the daughter of the workshop head; Jackan Grissom the ageing gruff chief engineer; and Guylan Bluford, another senior mage who has a combative relationship with Grissom. The story follows the team as they build bigger and bigger prototypes and try and solve all of the problems involved in going into space using a combination of engineering knowhow and magic. While sometimes Johnston delves into detail that might have been best left off the page, he maintains a sense of pressure with the threat that the team would be executed for treason if the true nature of their work is discovered.

First Mage on the Moon is a delightful and engaging fantasy book that focusses on a group of competent engineers. The ultimate journey is full of challenges and surprises. With the recent Artemis II mission still high in people’s minds, First Mage on the Moon is an alternative journey to the Moon that is well worth taking.

First Mage on the Moon by Cameron Johnston

8

8.0/10