The whole Solar System's police is perplexed: a string of mysterious phenomena runs through the whole system, with no one able to make heads or tails of it. No foul play is ever observed, but all clues seem to point to a disastrous expedition to Uranus' moon Oberon ten years ago, where half of the drop team died in a weird and still unexplained catastrophe, while the survivors seem to have acquired a lot of strange abilities.
Moon Rainbow is a 1983 hard science fiction novel by the Russian author Sergei Pavlov, consisting of two novellasnote , each telling a story of a different survivor of the disaster from a point of view of an independent investigator, exploring themes of transhumanism and humanity expansion into space. Rich in worldbuilding and combining a complex Mystery Fiction plot with dry and sparse, but surprisingly evocative storytelling, the novel quickly become a Cult Classic, and was followed by a Distant Sequel, The Miraculous Curl of Ampara, in 1991/1997note . A film adaptation was released in 1983, directed by Vladimir Karpichev and Andrei Yermash and featuring a score by Eduard Artemyev.
Unfortunately, the third planned novel, provisionally titled The White Rider and reportedly in the works for much of The 2000s and The New '10s, remained unfinished due to the Pavlov's death in 2019.
This work provides examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: Actually, quite more than that, but the technology, the clothing, the social mores etc. are still pretty clearly recognizable. Cars are still cars, police is still police, divorce is still divorce. In contrast, in the Distant Sequel set several centuries later, the life on the Earth has changed too much to be easily comprehended.
- Ace Pilot: A lot, though the expedition pilot Mef Aghann and the second part protagonist, his friend Andrey Tobolsky, are probably most notable. Aghann's skill was the only reason there were survivors at all.
- Aliens in Cardiff: In the sequel most of the action takes place in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, which is hardly known as a place to see the movers and shakers of the planet.
- Amateur Sleuth: Albertas Grizas, Moon Rainbow's doc, who is the first to notice the weirdness around the survivors couple of the cruises after the disaster.
- Badass Bookworm: All of the planetary drop specialists by default, as they are full-fledged planetologists with university degrees — who are also trained to be essentially Space Marines. Mart Frolov also deserves a honorary mention, being a textbook Professor and an almost stereotypical theoretical physicist, and still attempting to attack the phenomenon that consumed his friend — for which he was banned from space altogether.
- Badass Driver: Dave Norton, when he rushes to save a neighborhood kid who ran away to the old quarry at night. One of his new abilities is a radically heightened perception and improved reaction, in addition to his astronaut training.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: One of the peculiar abilities of the "modified" person is the lack of basic physical needs, including breathing. Unfortunatley, nobody had passed the notice to the body (and its involuntary reflexes), as Tobolsky eventually found
- Blessed with Suck: A lot of the abilities exotes received were weird, embarrassing or just plain unpleasant. And because most of them decided to quietly suffer alone, instead of seeking help for various reasons, few learned how to cope with them more comfortably.
- Body Horror: Some of the diseases that sometimes hit the humans in space could be singularly unpleasant. At least the "rubber paralysis" simply turns all bones and tendons in a body into a jelly, forcing the sufferers to live in a zero-G environment, but it doesn't affect their minds and is not painful. Venusian "blue rabies" is much worse.
- Can't Catch Up: Several characters express this feeling towards their rivals or admired persons. Kopayev, for example, is bitter because he cannot best Tobolsky in the ring, while Pauling feels inadequate compared to his brother-in-law, legendary Moon Dave, whom he has admired since childhood.
- Cartwright Curse: All the protagonists in the series can be united by their singular lack of luck with women, or, rather, the failure to hold a steady relationship. Tobolsky is essentially in a middle of a messy divorce because his wife cannot stand him being Married to the Job, Korneev in Ampara is a widower whose girlfriends continue to dump him, and Pauling is so negative that he's still single well into his thirties.
- Chrome Champion: One of the survivors' exotic abilities was the thick mercury-like ooze that they were able to secrete out of their bodies, which turned out to be surprisingly versatile, protective layer being just one of its features.
- Classical Anti-Hero: Frank Pauling, an ambitious but highly pessimistic Defective Detective, deeply convinced that there's nothing but threats in the Space for the Humanity, which is, in his opinion, woefully unprepared to anything it can encounter up there. Which only adds to his psychic baggage when he's sent to investigate his brother-in-law, whom he admires and sees as a Big Brother Mentor.
- Clueless Deputy: Andrey Tobolsky, the second part protagonist, has exactly zilch experience in a police work, as he's not a cop but a spaceship pilot, and was only deputized because of being the suspect's friend.
- Combo Platter Powers: The powers acquired by exotes in Moon Rainbow and especially those affected by Ampara in the sequel, are sometimes difficult to link up, or even understand, as with the latter. What does coming through the walls have in common with being The Needless?
- Cool Spaceship: The Baykal, Tobolsky's freighter, an enormous vessel capable of supplying all the settlements around Saturn in one go. It later becomes a research base for the temporal phenomena, stationed at Iapetus.
- Cursed with Awesome: As soon as the exotes' abilities were more or less understood, and their advantages became known, getting transformed became so popular that basically whole human population of Saturn system has found some way or another to contact the tempor-object, and it became a constant lure for the more and more enthusiasts until the government pretty much locked Saturn and its moons down.
- Defective Detective: Frank Pauling and Averian Kopayev, two very ambitious and capable, but extremely pessimistic detectives, deeply concerned by the extraterrestrial threats. Luckily, their fears were later covered by the whole transhumanist revolution, with Kopayev later mentioned to be heading the security service of the whole Saturn colony (while apparently retaining his Smug Snake attitude).
- Developing Doomed Characters: There's been thirteen named characters in the doomed expedition alone, each with their own personality and dynamics, and that's only the beginning.
- Distant Sequel: Curl of Ampara is set hundreds of years after Moon Rainbow, when humanity has (mostly) made peace with the existence of "galcits" (short for "galactic citizens", or "gragals" in original Russian) — descendants of the space colony founded by the exotes who were semi-exiled from Earth at the end of Soft Mirrors, but have since returned to Earth to help their less transhuman kin with space exploration.
- Eldritch Location: Any place where the tempor-object appears. Fire Snakes plateau on Mercury as well, especially as it breaks the human reproductive system, as was later found.
- Embarrassing Nickname: "Exotes", a nickname given to the Gurm survivors by the police because of the "exotic" abilities they got.
- Failed Future Forecast: Despite the lack of explicit mentions of borders and nations, a certain air of "us" and "them" with a hint of rivalry certainly exists. This suggests a "convergence" approach taken by the many authors during the Detente.
- Film of the Book: An adaptation of the first part of the novel, "On the Black Trace". The film adaptation was generally poorly-received due to its direction and production values, though the performances and score were widely praised.
- Flying Brick: The basic set of powers the exotes get, and it gets much, much weirder from there. Like a hand-cut wooden stick that becomes capable of receiving the children holovision channels.
- Human Architecture Horror:
- At the climax of Curl of Ampara, the protagonist uses his newly-awakened superpowers to send two terrorists who threatened his friend flying through a window... except that as a side effect of his powers, the windows don't break and the terrorists instead get fused with the glass half-way, still fully conscious and otherwise perfectly healthy. Despite the far future setting of the novel, the medics are as flabbergasted by this as one would expect.
- Another bandit from the same group gets yanked through the screen of a videophone he was used to make his demands, so his halves remain sticking from two differens screens in a different part of the (very large) building. The medics had to rig a special comm line only to get him more, ahem, compact, or at least into the same room.
- In an (almost) unrelated incident, when an another character tried to chastise a Dirty Cop sexually harassing a girl, he attempted to pull him from an aircar by his ear — only to stretch it a couple meters long.
- Hyperspace Is a Scary Place: Truth to be told, the likes of Pauling and Kopayev were demonstrated to be essentially
right, as there are a lot of really nasty surprises to the humans in space, and it was only a happy fluke that humanity stumbled on a good one before being wiped out by a Negative Space Wedgie out of nowhere. Ironically, hyperspace itself turned out to be relatively nice and safe. - Interservice Rivalry: There is notable tension between the "eastern" and "western" halves of IBSSLE: not to the point of the Teeth-Clenched Teamwork, but with a lot of Passive-Aggressive Kombat.
- Living Forever Is Awesome: A side effect to the exotes' transformation was radically lengthened lifespan, which was initially tentatively estimated as "no less than 1000 years" and later was considered essentially endless. By the times of the sequel (some 400 years later), the first generation was still alive and kicking, and this became a constant lure to increasing the exotes' numbers.
- Mildly Military:
- A general disarmament and lasting world peace was finally achieved on Earth, so only organisations resembling anything military were law enforcement agencies.
- Primary planetary research drop teams are essentially scientists, but they are organized along the military lines, strongly resembling Space Marines or paratroopers in spirit and behavior, rather than garden variety planetologists.
- Various rival philosophic schools in Ampara sometimes hire small private armies to serve as arguments when their debates become too heated.
- Mission Control: Mart Frolov for Tobolsky during the latter part of the "Soft Mirrors". He manages to find a good note with the confused pilot, guiding the latter's semi-coherent wandering around the tempor-object so efficiently that it allows Frolov to basically crack the puzzle overnight.
- Mystery Fiction: Subverted in that no crime actually happens in a whole book, and the mystery is essentially scientific in nature. The suspects are all fundamentally decent people and are only hiding something because of being embarrassed by the changes within them.
- Nanomachines: What the reason of all the weirdness turned to be. An interstellar life form that is essentially a bunch of living Nanomachines capable of self-organisation, direct matter-energy conversion and brainwave sensing turned out to be unfailingly attracted to the areas of distorted spacetime, which those disasters happened to be. And these found human bodies to be generally excellent hosts, entering into symbiotic relationship with humans.
- The Needless: The exotes technically don't have basic physical needs anymore, and can perfectly function without sleep, food, air and water, etc. It's just physically unpleasant, as their bodies still follow their basic routines requiring them to do so — as in still feeling hunger despite not physically needing the food, or wanting to sleep despite being unable to.
- Neologism:
- The word "gurm" (pronounced with a "goo" and a rolling "r") has no meaning or even related words in any existing language — it was invented by the survivors to give a name to a horror their brains were not capable of processing (not that it really helped). Much later, when mainstream humanity comes into contact with a gurm, they instead dub it "tempor-object".
- "Ampara" as well, for a very vague philosophic concept, which shares its name with an obscure small town in Sri-Lanka.
- Noodle Incident: The very disaster that started everything, nicknamed "Oberon Gurm" by its survivors.
- Posthumous Character: The dead half of the drop team remains quite important for the plot, not only as a psychic anchors for the survivors, but also because we later learn that exotes are able to produce very close copies of any person they remember, with limited personalities based on their recollections, which confused the investigators (and themselves) to no end.
- Pro-Human Transhuman: Despite losing their biological humanity rather completely, mentally the exotes remain fully human, and invariably side with their less-advanced brethren.
- Red Right Hand: Those affected by the catastrophe have several revealing traits two of which even serve as a names for the novel's two parts: first of the, the so called "Black Trace", is a black, burned-through spot left on a particular type of a screen when touched by a hand. Touching the screens allowed exotes to "ground off" their specialness for a time to pass the medical tests and such. Another one, the "Soft Mirror", is a thick, paste-like silvery substance that was produced by their bodies during maximum exertion.
- The Rival: Averian Kopayev considered Tobolsky that, both in police work (he was the main investigator of the Aghann's case, but the man simply refused to talk to him, and resented having to deputize Tobolsky), and in their mutual boxing hobby, were he just Can't Catch Up.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: The protagonists of both novellas were chosen because of their connection to the people they were sent to investigate: Frank Pauling because he was Dave Norton's brother-in-law, and Andrey Tobolsky as he struck an unlikely friendship with Mef Aghann in his youth. The conflict of interests is not lost on everyone involved, but the exotes simply refused to even talk to the unrelated people.
- Space Is an Ocean: Subverted — while a lot of things in space do resemble the "wet" naval tradition, others are completely different. No wet ship has ever needed to manage it's inertial trim during interorbit acceleration, for example.
- Space Police: The International Bureau of Space Security and Law Enforcement.
- Stable Time Loop: The leading theory on what "Ampara" and its "miraculous curl" are at the end of that novel is that future humans/exotes/whatever will have found a way to direct their own past without causing a paradox. All the weirdness attributed to Ampara is thus a result of a "curl" within spacetime continuum, caused by humanity reaching back in time from the future, which their ancestors see as Ampara acting In Mysterious Ways.
- Supering in Your Sleep: Near the end of Moon Rainbow, Tobolsky discovers that he is no longer a regular human after waking up in the middle of the night and finding himself floating comfortably two meters above his bed. He then proceeds to turn electronics on and off with his mind and to walk through a wall, just to test out what else he can do now.
- They Would Cut You Up: What some of the survivors fear. Others simply want to be left alone.
- Time Skip: Tobolsky spends about eight years of "out" time in the Iapetus Gurm due to some ill-advised walk. Turned out, disturbed spacetime is really sensitive as to how you cross it.
- Title Drop: "Moon Rainbow" was the name of the ship that carried the doomed expedition.
- Transhuman: Surviving the disaster gave everyone involved a lot of cool and powerful abilities. Deconstructed in that most of them never wanted anything more than getting rid of them.
- Voice with an Internet Connection: Tobolsky managed to know and befriend Frolov entirely over the phone, and has only met him in person only much after the time skip — mainly because Mart was locked out of the Saturn system for political reasons.
- What a Piece of Junk: Tobolsky's personal transport — an old and obsolete Kazarang-class dropship, which is, however, still very capable and nimble enough to let him survive the whole ordeal. Ironically, the Oberon drop team used the same Kazarang-class boat ten years ago.
- Worldbuilding: Pavlov's all-time forte, as he's essentially visualizes the whole scene and then describes it in a sparse, show-don't-tell manner to a striking effect.
- Year Outside, Hour Inside: Traversing a "tempor-object" in a non-optimal direction can lead to some seriously weird time effects due to time and space being inextricably entwined inside, as Tobolsky's raid has shown.
