In 1969, Apollo 11 became the first crewed spacecraft to land on the moon. So many decades later, how far are we from the promise of that landing? For all the mechanized missions sent to Mars (including several robotic rovers that spent years investigating its surface), we’ve yet to see people on the red planet. The moon, meanwhile, continues to fascinate, whether via pop songs like Savage Garden’s “To the Moon & Back” or the continued exploration of the rocky orbiter.
Isa Arsén’s debut novel, Shoot the Moon, follows Annie Fisk, who works at NASA in the final years of the space race to the moon. As the book begins, Annie is hiding from a loud Christmas party at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston when she’s interrupted by a navigator named Norm. The two forge an instant connection that seems almost too good to be true; not only do they speak soulfully about the moon shot, but they also seem to feel a deeper spark of recognition. “Do we know each other?” Norm murmurs.
They don’t seem to, but the question has been planted in our minds.
Shoot the Moon moves between a chronological timeline that covers the years 1966 to 1969—when Annie is at NASA, first as a secretary and then as a programmer—and other chapters that explore Annie’s childhood. Scattered in between are sections recalling Annie’s college years, which reveal further aspects of her character: a love affair with a woman named Evelyn and an increasing infatuation with physics. Such details help color in many of the outlines apparent throughout the rest of Annie’s life. Arsén relies on us to trust her as she teases out what has made her protagonist who she is, and the early clues she lays out become increasingly significant the more we progress through the narrative.
Annie’s relationship to science and discovery, for instance, is set in motion in early childhood. Her father, Ford Fisk, was a scientist haunted by guilt over his work on the development of the atom bomb. “We’ve gone too far playing God,” he tells his wife in 1949 while driving with young Annie in the back seat. “If there was ever a plan it’s out the window now. We just get to stand and watch the same fucking song and dance all over again. There’s no future. None.”
After Ford dies by (an implied) suicide, Annie—then a teenager—is faced with a black hole where the memories of her childhood should be. This explains why the chapters about her early years are narrated in third person, while those that begin with her leaving home for college are narrated by her directly.
Memory plays a large part in Shoot the Moon’s trajectory, both in its structure and in how the concept of time travel becomes explicit in the middle of the book. Early on, we learn of a mysterious clump of rosebushes in the garden of the New Mexico house where Annie grew up. Things appear there: staplers, paperweights, bits of writing she can’t understand. One day, a girl about her age shows up there too. Her name is Diana, and she becomes Annie’s friend. Diana, however, always disappears after a few minutes.
Later, while working as a programmer at NASA, Annie discovers what she can only call a wormhole; an innocuous-looking floor tile amid the rows of computer banks on which things appear and disappear.
The wormhole is literal, its behavior observable, measurable, scientific, and Annie approaches it as such. But much like the moon, which functions here as both a metaphor and a specific reality, the wormhole acts too as a metaphor for the character’s memory. What is memory, after all, but a kind of time travel that we perform in our minds? The wormhole becomes a prompt as well as a prophecy; as Annie drops in staplers and paperweights, she creates her childhood memories and also rediscovers them, one at a time.
Shoot the Moon is a thoughtful, playful novel that ultimately uses the vastness of space to evoke that of each complex and multifaceted human life.•
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. Masad is the author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers and is co-editing a forthcoming anthology about The Bachelor franchise. Her new novel, Beings, comes out in September 2025.
