Books book reviews Houston, We Have A Problem: Cameron Johnston’s First Mage on the Moon Sasha Bonkowsky reviews the science fantasy novel from Cameron Johnston By Sasha Bonkowsky | Published on April 28, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? […] We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard… When stray lightning sends an alchemical cannon shooting into the sky, military engineer Ella Pickering is struck with a lightning bolt of her own: What if she could harness the same power and visit the moon? That grey disk, 240,000 miles away, hosts the Silver Palace of the gods, who’ve watched for centuries as Ella’s country of Unity and the Ranneas Empire fight to a bloody, ruinous stalemate. Prayers and pleas have so far failed to convince them, but maybe an emissary, to knock on their doors and demand the slaughter ends… It’s a mad, treacherous idea—not to mention deeply heretical—but it just might work. Of course, she can’t actually request funding for a rocket. Military money to an initiative not directly focused on killing more of the Empire’s mages and princes—unthinkable! But the man in charge of the alchemical design, Jackan Grissom, is equally inspired by her talk of moonshot. He’s had enough of building bombs and bone-shredding devices; he wants magic to mean something again, to be used for good. Together, they begin laying out their calculations, the gunpowder and flame and levitation runes needed to escape the Great Mother’s pull and reach space. The project grows. Jackan and the ambitious Guylan Bluford retrieve the experimental prototype from No Man’s Land and the twisted remnants of magic that occupy the place. When they’re set upon by Empire mages intent on stealing Unity tech, Jackan brokers a truce by telling them the truth about the rocket and that it has no combat capabilities. Imperial sergeant Andriyan Korolev is duly impressed, and lets them go with half the prototype and a promise to report back to his boss Taeban Tereshkova; Bluford is less impressed, but comes around after realizing the prestige and glory that would come with being first in space. Back at camp, Ella recruits the cheery mathematical genius Katherine Goddard to join them, then lies to a noble’s face that really, all they’re working on is a way to drop war golems behind enemy lines and wreak havoc. The noble is delighted, and offers them near-unlimited funding… but using it for a moon landing instead has just gone from “maybe treason” to “definitely treason”. Whoops1. Buy the Book First Mage on the Moon Cameron Johnston Buy Book First Mage on the Moon Cameron Johnston Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget I really wanted to like this book. The premise is incredible—mages! Going to the moon!—and I loved many of its approaches to traditional aerospace engineering problems. The exponential growth of the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation (that to lift a rocket, you need fuel, but to lift that fuel, you need more fuel, and so on) making your life hell? Ella’s levitation runes from her time as a skymage can fix it. How to supply fresh oxygen in a sealed capsule for several days? Pressurized liquid oxygen is far outside our characters’ technological abilities, but summoning an air elemental isn’t. Need wireless communications? No radios, but scrying through a crystal ball works just as well. The trouble is, First Mage on the Moon isn’t much beyond its premise. It’s a straight line of a story, heading directly towards the moon and steamrolling any interesting character tensions or suspense that might deviate it. For instance, you might think that because going to the moon is a Tower-of-Babel kind of blasphemy, any of our engineers might have issues with it based on their faith. These are men and women who pray for storms, who have priests to guide the dead to the underworld; what happens when they’re asked to put those beliefs aside and stand as equals with the gods in the Silver Palace? Fortunately for the fledgling space program, nothing. None of its crew are pious or have any qualms about flying to the gods’ own palaces. Similarly, everyone they recruit to the project—even Korolev and Tereshkova, enemy combatants—are functionally on board as soon as the moonshot’s explained to them, each as starry-eyed as Ella and Jackan. Unlike rocketry, though, this sort of inexorable forward momentum is a drag on the book. If getting to the moon is all but guaranteed—if there’s no question about the crew’s commitment to the project, or whether they’re willing to risk their lives—what exactly am I reading for? First Mage feels like a first draft rushed to publication because its back-cover copy was strong, without putting the work in to craft it into a rich story. On a craft level, the book’s prose is often just as clumsy. When Jackan and Guylan are assigned together for their venture into No Man’s Land, we get this statement: [Jackan] snatched his hand back, checking to make sure all his fingers were still there. The older engineer put a hand on the door, then turned to Guylan and sighed. “So, we don’t like each other much. That’s fine, but know I will watch your back out there. Let’s get this over with and get back to proper work as soon as we can.” One passage does not a book make, but First Mage is riddled with lines like these: characters awkwardly stating exactly the emotion or motivation they’re expressing, as if worried the reader won’t pick up on it otherwise. Just a few pages earlier, after Ella’s told she was unfairly blamed for an airship accident that broke her spine, she goes from fury at herself to fury at the hierarchs, as well as questions about if her punishment is truly done. The narration then helpfully informs us, “Her self-recrimination gave way to anger and a measure of paranoia.” This sort of unsubtle declaration feels like it’s made for casual viewing, the film genre popularized by Netflix in which screenwriters are told to “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along”. But the best books give expansive leeway to interpret characters’ actions and play the story out in readers’ imaginations; for a book about starstruck dreams and expansive ideals, First Mage allows very little room to soar indeed. I wish First Mage had been good. Space exploration is inspiring, even magical—I finished reading the book about the same time the Artemis II astronauts splashed down safely in the ocean, carrying the hopes of the world with them. But for all it tries to capture the same excitement, First Mage doesn’t quite get off the ground.[end-mark] The eagle-eyed, or those who were hopelessly obsessed with space when they were six like your humble correspondent, might notice that every main character is named after a famous rocket scientist or astronaut: Bill Pickering ran JPL for 20 years in the 50s and 60s, Gus Grissom flew in the Mercury and Gemini programs and died in the Apollo 1 fire, Guion Bluford was a Shuttle astronaut who was the first African-American in space, Robert Goddard built the first liquid-fuel rocket, Sergei Korolev ran the USSR’s rocket program during the Space Race, and Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space. ︎ First Mage on the Moon is published by Angry Robot. The post Houston, We Have A Problem: Cameron Johnston’s <i>First Mage on the Moon</i> appeared first on Reactor.