World building — BioDomes
So … what kind of colony would we find on the Moon?
I set my story in the year 2080. We talk a lot about going back to the Moon, but it hasn’t happened yet. I decided about in the 2030s. Give it about another ten years for establishing a colony. I wanted teenagers aged up to 18 who’d only ever known life on the Moon, that gives me approx the year 2080.
NASA is talking a lot about a modular city, perhaps buried under soil to protect it from radiation — you don’t have an atmosphere on the Moon or magnetic field, so you’re exposed to much more radiation.
I liked the idea more of putting my colonists in tunnels underground, it gave it a more claustrophobic feel. There have been recent discoveries of water on the Moon in the poles, so I sent my colony to the south pole.
Next came my huge problem — I wanted a colony of about a thousand, so how would I feed and water them? Sending supplies from Earth would be expensive.
I always loved the movie Silent Running, and loved the ideas of having a lot of these kinds of greenhouses on the Moon. In truth it would be more efficient about having hydroponics — you see this in the TV series Mars.
However I’d read articles where they’d grown plants using soil they’d collected from the Moon to show it could be done — chemically it has a similar mix to our own, it’s just the water that’s a key issue, but it has been found on the poles.
I decided to go for more Silent Running what I’d call “BioDomes”, where you’d grow things conventionally. From a dramatic perspecitve I liked the idea of these areas being therapautic. People on the Moon having some for food, some more for oxygen generation, and some purely for recreation like our own parks. Indeed in part of the book, a couple are discovered having sex “in the great outdoors” (my book does have some adult themes, not just sex).
Ironically, for a book about space, a lot of the colony uses quite relatively “tried and tested” low tech. Pollination in the biodomes uses bees — one manages to find its way into the colony tunnels at one point. It doesn’t come out in the book, but I worked out it’d make sense to use worms on the Moon vs some kind of exotic technology.
In early drafts of my book, I had them eating a really wierd plankton extract. But I ended up working out that if they could grow food, they could survive off it, and the less artificial foodstuffs. This is where I get a bit method acting in my research. So I switched to a mainly vegan diet for about three months to work out what they could eat.
I can assure you, I’m an affirmed omnivore, but I quite enjoyed it and could get into my characters head. I can enjoy now and appreciate a really good vegetarian / vegan meal now, but I’m back to my omnivore ways now.
With the BioDomes a key part of the colony, it made me think more about the people living there really being focused on the ecosystem they were building beneath glass. Sometimes fanatically so.
Some of the early drafts involved tension between the main character Melody Harper, who’d come from a disposable society, and the Lunar colonists who were obsessive recyclers.
As I’ve said, although my book had no aliens, it did in many ways have an alien culture!
A key point I made previously about inspiration, and the line between just copying, and using the ideas to leapfrog you forward in your own writing, especially if it’s a concept familiar to others.
The BioDomes I did take from Silent Running — that’s inspiration. However if my story had become all about my main character protecting the last BioDomes of human forest, that’s where I move from inspiration into outright copying!
I think my book should come with it’s own soundtrack, and there’s none finer than this track from Silent Running …
You can buy Melody Harper’s Moon through Amazon,
In the UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Melody-Harpers-Moon-Meike-Torkelson-ebook/dp/B07GTYY3NL
In the US: https://www.amazon.com/Melody-Harpers-Moon-Meike-Torkelson-ebook/dp/B07GTYY3NL
In Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/Melody-Harpers-Moon-Meike-Torkelson-ebook/dp/B07GTYY3NL
Note — the Moon is pretty much in the same orbit as the Earth, meaning it gets the right level of Sun to grow plants. Meaning it’ll be much easier to grow food on the Moon than on Mars where the Sun is so much weaker. The problem of the “lunar day” is another story though — 14 days of Sun, 14 days of darkness. You’ll need some artificial light sources for sure.
