Crater

February 1, 2012
Long-haul trucking on the Moon...with raiders, romance and a secret mission. Teenage orphan Crater Trueblood was plucked from the Helium-3 mines by lunar kingpin Colonel Medaris because he's an "honest man who was above suspicion and also easily manipulated." Trueblood suddenly finds himself scouting for a convoy headed for Armstrong City and charged with picking up a mysterious package. In the course of an eventful trip, Crater survives numerous natural hazards out in the "big suck," learns how to deal with rambunctious truckers (much like herding cats) and plays various high-speed low-gravity sports. He also hooks up with the Colonel's mercurial granddaughter Maria and battles genetically altered superwarriors with help from a vacuum-suited horse and a Tribble-like supercomputer. Tongue planted pretty firmly in cheek, Hickam tucks in rough-and-ready characters with names like Nitro Ned and Unlisted Sally, along with ballads ("All I want is a moon dust girl, / Down in a crater waitin' for love...."), sexist comments, running jokes and prayers to the "Big Miner." As he leaves his protagonist at the brink of a war with Earth and determined to "keep his homeland safe," sequels are plainly in the offing. High adventure on the space frontier. The horse is a nice touch. (Science fiction. 11-13)

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Starred review from May 1, 2012

Gr 6 Up-Best known for Rocket Boys (Delacorte, 1998), which has been published in a dozen different languages and then made into both a movie and a musical, Hickam has written another hit, Crater, his first novel for teens. Sixteen-year-old Crater Trueblood is a scragline picker, a menial worker responsible for keeping rocks and debris out of the machinery used for harvesting helium-3 from the surface of the Moon. When he makes a daring decision to save a fellow miner and averts a potentially fatal disaster, the enterprising orphan comes to the attention of the Colonel, who sends him on a secret and, most likely, deadly mission to retrieve a mysterious object. In the company of the Colonel's granddaughter and an amorphous blob of semi-intelligent jelly known as a gillie, the teen finds himself caught up in a web of intrigue and danger where he faces doom at every turn both from subhuman creatures and the inhospitable lunar surface itself. Classic science-fiction storytelling in the style of early Heinlein, humor, and grand adventure permeate every page of this first book in a trilogy. Boys in particular may be inspired to bring back the time-honored tradition of reading by flashlight under the covers.-Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK

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