DIFFERENT CITY, SAME CREEPS!
Dateline: 2125. The Moon City of Luna-1 is the single largest human settlement off planet Earth, with an international population millions-strong inside a huge network of sealed domes and arcologies.
Once a symbol of global co-operation, Luna-1 has become a mixture of the best and the worst the Mega-City system has to offer – here, common crimes occur side-by-side with international intrigue and power politics, where one wrong move can leave you sucking vacuum…
But what have the vast MoonieCorp business empire and the Moon-U pirate radio station got to do with the trouble?
As chaos and lawlessness threaten to overwhelm the beleaguered lunar justice department, Mega-City One’s top lawman Judge Dredd answers a call for help and leads an international force of Judges to assist; but out in the darkness, a conspiracy of revenge is about to plunge Luna-1 into an urban firestorm, and Dredd must save the Moon before his time – and his air! – runs out…
An all-new story from the future-shocked worlds of the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic – 2000AD!
Download a pdf extract of Eclipse: 
AUTHOR’S NOTES:
This was my first prose adventure featuring 2000AD‘s toughest lawman, Judge Joseph Dredd; Eclipse is an original novel with a plotline that takes Dredd from his home turf of Mega-City One to the high frontier of the Moon and the domed colony of Luna-1 – a fixture of the Judge Dredd universe since the strip’s inaugural run in 1977!
Eclipse was reprinted in I Am The Law: The Judge Dredd Omnibus.
The original working title for the Eclipse plotline was Red Moon, but I chose to alter it to avoid similarity to David Bishop’s first Judge Dredd novel in the Black Flame series, Bad Moon Rising; the book was briefly re-titled Total Eclipse at one point. Big influences on the storyline were, first and foremost, the original 2000AD Luna-1 stories from way back in 1977 and to a lesser extent the shorter ‘Darkside’ strip in later issues – much respect to John Wagner, Brian Bolland, Ian Gibson and the rest of the creators who shaped the concept of 2000AD’s Moon life. Other lunar science fiction that exerted an tidal effect on me includes; Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Allen Steele’s The Tranquility Alternative, John M. Ford’s Growing Up Weightless and the comicbook series Astronauts in Trouble; the TV shows Space: 1999, UFO, Cowboy Bebop, Star Cops; the movies Moontrap, Apollo 13 and Destination Moon.
The genesis of this novel came in a failed project for another medium; I had pitched the concept for “The Rookie’s Guide to Luna-1”, a roleplaying supplement for the Judge Dredd RPG without success, and so I found myself with a fistful of research matter with nowhere to go; in the process of coming up with the game idea, I crossed paths with Rob Williams, a talented comics writer who had completed a new Luna-1 story called ‘Breathing Space’. Taking the Luna-1 setting instead as the basis for a book, I thought it would be cool to create a cross-over between the Black Flame novels and the Dredd strips, so I back-engineered a few references from Rob’s plot to slot into the narrative of Eclipse. Thus, events that take place in the book directly set up situations that appear in ‘Breathing Space’. Rob’s story, drawn by artists Laurence Campbell and Lee Townsend (originally by Peter Doherty), will appear in forthcoming Progs of 2000AD. One of Dredd’s last few lines in the novel directly references the title of Rob’s plotline, foreshadowing what is to come in Luna-1’s continuity.
Although it isn’t mention explicitly in the novel, Eclipse takes place in the Summer of 2125, a little after the events of the audio drama Judge Dredd: Dreddline. For more about that story, Click Here.
Names and namechecks; Kontarsky is named after a character from Firefox, and I’ve always thought it was a cool Russian surname; Rodriquez is named after Bender, the robot from Futurama, and like him he smokes, drinks and chases girls; Foster takes his name from a character in UFO; Spring and Kenzy are from Star Cops; Koenig is from Space: 1999; Ortiz is from seaQuest DSV; Judges Evans, Chapman, Lee, Wright, Vandal and J’aele are named after some of my mates. Ortiz also appears briefly in my audio drama Judge Dredd: Jihad, which is set after the events of this novel.
Chapter titles; ‘Tranquillity Base’ and ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ reference the Apollo 11 lunar landing. The later is also, like ‘No Escape’ and ‘High Noon’, the name of a movie. ‘Politika’ is the title of a Tom Clancy novel and videogame.
As is my wont, I peppered the text with movie, tv and book references. Dave Fincher Overzoom commemorates the director of Fight Club and Seven (and I wrote a book about him, too); the Harsh Mistress sex club is of course a reference to Heinlein’s aforementioned novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; Alias fans may recognise a disguised Sydney Bristow as one of the clubbers; the Satellite of Love and the Gizmonics store are nods to Mystery Science Theater 3000; other references include Dexter’s Laboratory, The Beatles, Marshal Law, The Police and Doctor Who.
Judge Dredd continuity; aside from the more obvious elements and references to previous Luna-1 stories, I tried to put in some more subtle ties to the comics. Among these; the necromancer Sabbat and the nuking of Mega-City 2 from the “Judgement Day” storyline; the kneepad store Forbidden Knee, a reference to the London comics shop Forbidden Planet, which appeared in a Dredd strip many years ago; other 2000AD references include the alien Uqqans, and the appearance of several international Judges from cities like Brit-Cit, Hondo, East-Meg 2, Simba City, Oz and others.
Anyone who regularly travels on the London Underground might recognise some of the names of the MC-1 Apocalypse War veterans in chapter 16; Arnos LeGrove (Arnos Grove), Gidea Parq (Gidea Park), Drayton Parq (Drayton Park), Bruce LeGrove (Bruce Grove), Perry Vale (Perivale), Maida Vale, Lou Isham (Lewisham) and Shadwell…
