Kyreol abandons her betrothed husband and paddles down a world-spanning river as she searches for an enigmatic stranger. Moon-Flash is an interesting experiment in genre science-fiction that consciously avoids European paradigms (the characters are non-white; the mythology is non-Western), but it feels slight and underdeveloped. The best part of the novel is the Hunter Orcrow, who is patiently bemused by the two adolescents dogging his trail. ( )

An unusual and poignant coming-of-age story. Kyreol leaves her hunter-gatherer community to travel down the river, searching for answers. The further she travels, the more things she discovers that contradict what she been taught about the world.

I wasn’t sure what to expect since, unlike nearly everything else McKillip has written, this is science-fiction rather than fantasy. There’s a certain McKillip-ish ambiguity to the worldbuilding, which I thought was nicely juxtaposed against Kyreol’s more straightforward emotional journey. I really liked Moon-Flash but not in quite the same way I really liked McKillip’s most recent novel, Kingfisher. Less aesthetic appreciation, more emotional connection, perhaps.

One year was like any year; one Moon-Flash was every Moon-Flash. A man would die on one part of the River, but someone else would be born on another part to take his place. She herself was every woman; her growing, her betrothal no different than a woman’s in the past or a woman to be born. She was part of the River, flowing into her place as the fish and the trees flowed into theirs. There was no need for her to think about being happy, any more than a bird thought about it. The moon never questioned the moon-fire; the fish never questioned their voicelessness.
But. ( )

I read the sequel to this book (The Moon and the Face) in June - and wow, this book is just so much better. Even if I had read them in the proper order, I'm pretty sure my opinion would be the same.
'Moon-Flash' is a simple, short book, but carefully crafted, emotionally touching, and with subtle social commentary.
Kyreol is a young woman of a primitive society. Her people live along the banks of a river, their world circumscribed by a cliff face upstream and a waterfall downstream. No one has ever ventured beyond these limits. Time is measured by the Moon-Flash, an event given religious significance - a time for betrothals and ritual.
However, Kyreol has always been more curious than others of her tribe - and when she meets a strange Hunter in the woods, she sets out, with her childhood friend, Terje, leaving her betrothed behind, to see what might lie beyond the boundaries of her world... and to try to discover what might have happened to her mother, long-since-disappeared.

What Kyreol finds is that her people have been living 'protected' by a high-technology society - almost like an ethnological museum exhibit. Even the most sacred event of her people is simply a technological phenomenon of the wider world.

It's an interesting discussion - although McKillip doesn't romanticize the 'simple life' of the primitive people too much - and neither does she paint them as wide-eyed innocents (they are intelligent, resourceful, and quickly adaptable) - she does make the point that in a more sophisticated society, something may be lost. In this case, she hints, it may be the precognitive(?) dreams of the people of the Riverworld. But even so, does any society have the right to hide things from another, denying them knowledge, and therefore, choice? ( )