Growing Up Weightless, by John M. Ford
Speculative fiction parenting and trains on the Moon
I mentioned at the end of the Sinners post where I talked about my Inverse Mike Ford problem that that would not be the only Mike Ford content posted in the summer of 2025. That’s because thinking about that phrase got me thinking about his books, which in turn led to re-reading his 1993 book Growing Up Weightless. I’ve really loved this book since I first read it not long after it came out, but it’d been a good while since I re-read it— possibly since before the kids were born. On this re-read, it remains an outstanding example of a lot of the things I like best in the SF genre; it was out of print for a good long while, but has been re-released, and I highly recommend it.
This is, as you can probably guess from the title, a science-fiction story about parents and kids, specifically a 13-year-old named Matthias Ronay, who lives on an independent Luna (said with a short “u”, please) a couple of generations past the rebellion that broke free from Earth. His family played a role in the revolution, and his father, Albin, is a composer and politician, a member of the Water Board charged with securing an essential resource. As is often the case with teens and parents, they don’t really get along— Matt chafes at what he sees as excessive parental oversight, and desperately wants to get away from the neighborhood of Earth by joining the crew of an interstellar transport using the MIRAGE drive to hop instantaneously across vast distances. For his part, Albin is concerned about shielding Matt (and the rest of Luna) from an impending crisis.
Matt has reached the age where he can start working for money, but still needs parental approval, so he’s blocked from taking his dream job (which also would require extensive surgery to add the interfaces needed to work with the MIRAGE ships). He has a couple of offers to sort out— a role with a theater company, or a tech position with more local transportation— and also a friend group that’s reaching one of those key adolescent inflection points. The story centers on a pivotal week or so in which the teenagers have planned a grand adventure, taking a train ride to the Farside during which they’ll spend a lot of time in a virtual-reality game where they’re doing a version of Robin Hood. At the same time, Albin is wrestling with a proposal from the Vacuum Corporation of Earth to supply the Moon with enough water to solve all their problems, but at a price he finds uncomfortably high.
There’s a lot going on in this book; to start with, the setting has a level of detail that borders on the obsessive. Ford worked out Lunar life to a degree where you kind of suspect he had a notebook listing the catalog numbers for replacement parts for the trains. At the same time, though, he’s cleverly vague at key points: the MIRAGE drive gets a bit of technobabble connecting it to speculative physics about dark matter, but the only thing that matters is how it works: it will only operate when accompanied by a conscious observer, and when operated in a gravity well, it pulverizes everything that it transports.
Ford is also doing a thing that’s somehow showy and subtle at the same time: the book is conceived as a single tracking shot, with the narrative point of view switching between Matt and Albin only at times when you could imagine a physical movie camera jumping from following one to following the other1. At the same time, it inhabits both of the characters in a really deep way, so you don’t necessarily pick up on it. At least, I didn’t consciously notice on the first read, but after hearing Teresa Nielsen Hayden talk about how it drove Ford nuts that there was one scene where he couldn’t make the transition seamless because the plot demanded they be far apart2, it’s really obvious. And impressive, in a super writerly way.
There’s also some stuff in this that probably shouldn’t work for me. All of the characters are operating in a very heightened register, with dialogue that flirts with both “implausibly clever” and “overly portentous.” Matt and his friends, in particular, are Theatre Kids at a level that in other hands I might find really grating3. And, in fact, I often have, in other books.
What carries it off here, though, is that Ford really nails both sides of the father-son dynamic. Matt in particular really captures a particular kind of adolescent moment— trying to be tough and cynical but too fundamentally a Good Kid to really get there; deeply empathetic with his friends but somehow also utterly clueless about their relationship; desperately wanting… something, but prone to shifting what, exactly, that is. My relationship with my parents was never as strained as this, but this really nails the vibe of being a teenager in a way that clicks for me where lots of other teen-centered books do not.
Albin is also really well drawn, especially the way he’s working super hard to head off things he would’ve done at that age without fully understanding his son’s completely different goals and motivations. Again, my relationship with my kids isn’t as fraught as this, but at the same time, I can see some not-particularly-flattering echoes of myself in here, and will need to think a bit about what to do with that.
Getting both of those to feel so right is really impressive, and very moving. It’s also amazingly effective that when they have their big moment of connection at the very end, neither of them really understands what happened. There’s also some ironic symmetry in the way the character arcs resolve that’s satisfying because it’s not satisfying, but you probably have to read it for that to make sense.
So, anyway, this remains (for me) an absolutely wonderful book, that does a bunch of things and excels at all of them. If you haven’t read it before, I highly recommend checking it out.
That’s as highbrow a book review as you’re going to get from the last month or two— other than this, I’ve powered through a bunch of airport thrillers. If you liked this, or hope to hear about airplane reads, here’s a button:
And if you feel so moved, the comments will be open:
Until the very end, anyway, where the denouement brings in another POV and some discontinuous jumps.
It’s finessed by having one character drop off to sleep thinking about the other.
They’re also a bit too young, or at least feel a bit older than their stated ages, but it’s not a huge point.
I had spotted a used copy of it ~15 years ago and it sat on the shelf unread for a long time, such that by the first time I read it, I had kids. I am guessing it hits differently with/without. The detail and lack-of-being-obvious was fantastic, but a lot of the in-RPG scenes dragged for me. Still, fantastic book.
I still enjoy SF, but I feel as if the window has closed on space travel, both as an actual possibility and as a literary device.
We can probably manage a small permanent base on the moon, but we could build a small city at the South Pole for a fraction of the cost and at much less risk to the inhabitants. Mars is a pipe dream with our current technology and anything beyond that is inconsistent with basic physics and biology. Voyager just made it one light day from earth, and that took nearly 50 years.
As for space-based SF, now that Iain M. Banks is gone, I don't see any need for more. Our survival on earth (as in Ministry for the Future) is where we need some speculative imagination.