First Mage on the Moon
DETAILS:
Publisher: Angry Robot
Publication Date: April 14, 2026
Format: Paperback
Length: 320
Read Date: July 9-15, 2026
He slid the paper across her workbench and stood there, waiting expectantly.
She sighed and glanced down, paused, then looked harder at the scrawl of handwriting. On the page was a circle representing their world, and another, smaller circle with a crude palace of the gods crowning it, depicting the moon. A straight dotted line ran from one circle to the other, surrounded by numbers and calculations, many scored out.
“What is this unholy mess?” she asked.
Jackan nodded at his workings. “You tell me, lass.”
She studied it, determining distance and speed and… “What is this number?”
“Weight,” he said.
She frowned, trying to fit it all together. “It looks like you are trying to figure out the speed you would need to achieve to get something the weight of a stone golem to the surface of the moon.”
He rocked backwards and forwards on his heels. “Mmmhmm. Thoughts?”
She looked up at him, eyes widening as she took in his sincerity and remembered an off-hand comment made the day before. “Why the moon? Is it just a thought experiment?’
He nodded. “Sure is.” Then, under his breath: “For now.”
What’s First Mage on the Moon About?
An accident triggered by lightning and experimental weaponry leads Ella Pickering to have a conversation or two with the engineer Jackan Grissom. Ella was a skymage, flying ships in the war—after a crash that landed her in a wheelchair, she’s been working in a weapons factory doing grunt work. She knows enough to see that Grissom’s weapon wasn’t really that much of a weapon.
It turns out that he’s actually trying to build something to reach the home of the Gods—the Moon. Ella is intrigued and gets herself assigned to his team. They recruit a couple of other people—actually, no. one person blackmails her way onto their team, and they get saddled with another. Their boss believes they are working on a revolutionary weapon—but that’s the last thing they want to do.
Essentially, they’re stealing money and resources from the government’s war effort to undertake a mission that is (or at least approaches) blasphemy. And anyone figuring out what they’re doing is going to lead to their demise.
The Little Touches
For recovering Space Race junkies like me, there are so many things to find joy in.
Johnston has worked in several—more than several—little Easter Egg-type things throughout the book. Allusions to Star Trek and Firefly, several names that make you think of Gemini and Mercury astronauts, there’s a very USSR-snooping-on-the-Mercury-Program feel to things, the alternative to Laika or Ham the Astrochimp is inspired—and only possible in a Fantasy novel.
Why did I pick this up? Why did I keep reading?
“Aye,” the old engineer said. “Most guild-taught mages think that every little problem can be solved by using the right magic, but there’s only so many arcane runes and enchantments you can add to something before they snarl each other up explode in your face. I was a stonemason and an engineer before I was an accredited mage, so I thought to myself ‘alchemy, now, that’s a different matter entirely’. If we use our brains as well as our aether, we are bound to improve the efficiency of both.”
I picked this up because The Last Shield convinced me that I want to read a lot more of Johnston (and I still do). Also—the idea of a magic user headed to the moon in a rocket-looking thing is just too great to pass up.
Why did I keep reading it? As much as I dislike an in medias res beginning and typically don’t find them that effective in getting me to answer something, this one had me invested. How do we get from the beginning (see my Opening Lines post) to this point?
Even without that, I’d have been in—watching a bunch of magic users function as engineers and scientists with their magic, rather than just muttering something and waving their hands to get a wonderful result—is such a great idea, and was fun to read. It’s possibly the best idea in the book, and the execution really makes you want to see other Fantasy writers take a stab at things along those lines.
What does this book tell us about humanity?
It’s very much in the spirit of one of Sam Seaborn’s better lines:
Mallory O’Brian: Do we really have to go to Mars?
Sam Seaborn: Yes.
Mallory O’Brian: Why?
Sam Seaborn: ‘Cause it’s next. ‘Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what’s next.
At the core, this book is about a bunch of decent and smart people who are tired of a war that doesn’t seem to have an end, or much of a point. They’re tired of pumping out weapons and have found a way to use their magic and smarts for something positive. That human spirit that Sam puts into words permeates the novel, in the middle of everything else—these people want to take to the sky.
Not just among the team—but across borders.There’s a real international appeal to their efforts, but I’ll leave that for you to see.
So, what did I think about First Mage on the Moon?
“Up there, beyond this ball of rock, sea, and soil, is something humanity knows nothing about. We have so many questions without answers, and so many questions we don’t even know to ask.”
This wasn’t the book that I thought it was going to be—but I’m not complaining.
One thing that I’d have liked to see more of is the developing friendships among the team. There’s enough science and engineering, political maneuvering going on, espionage, and warfare that there really wasn’t room for it. But those little moments of conversation between them, collaboration, and growing bonds were the best parts of the book. The character work was very well done, but not the priority of the novel (and I wish it was).
This was, instead, a book about war, the costs of it (in many senses), hope, those who benefit from destruction, and the systems that encourage this behavior. What our astronauts learn about their gods is more than unexpected, but fits in with the overarching themes of the book.
I’m not entirely sure that I can say that I enjoyed this book—but I’m very glad that I read it. The ideas, the characters, and the execution were more than worth the investment of time. And the last page or so really just sealed the deal on this being a good read.
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