Abstract
If the Lunar Gothic is influenced by both mythology and scientific aspiration, then it is influenced, too, by sterility. The Darkangel series by Meredith Ann Pierce—comprising The Darkangel (1982), A Gathering of Gargoyles (1985), and The Pearl of the Soul of the World (1990)—is located on the borders of this sterility. A fantastical world, brought into creation by terraforming, is slowly dying. The machinery keeping the manufactured ecology of the moon alive is breaking down, as Earth, source of the scientists responsible for the creation of the living lunar environment, has fallen into war and silence and extinction. Earth, called Oceanus by the inhabitants of the moon, has therefore become an inverted mirror image of its satellite: where once the inhabitants of Oceanus looked upon a dead world, now the inhabitants of that formerly dead world look upon the sterile planet of their creators. Notably, this pattern of sterility is reflected, in miniature, in the primary antagonists of the series. The darkangels of the title are vampiric creations who are both sterile themselves and inducers of sterility in the areas of the moon under their control. The loss of young women, and their transformation into withered crones following their forced marriages to the darkangels, foreshadows the breaking down of a mechanism which ensures the continued existence of lunar life.