The Maurice on the Moon series began as a classroom assignment Barth gave to his astronomy students: imagine how your favorite sport would change if you played it on another planet with different gravity, atmosphere, temperature, etc. Mr. Barth wrote Jump like an Earthman, a short story about a boy trying out for the high jump team on the Moon based on this concept, and read the story at a meeting of the Temecula Children's Writers Club, where he was a member. Other club members insisted that this sounded much more like a chapter in a book than a short story and encouraged him to flesh out the concept. Maurice on the Moon was born from this idea. When Mr. Barth returned to Claremont Graduate University in 2003 to pursue his doctoral degree, he took Maurice with him, and made the teaching science through literature concept a centerpiece of his doctoral studies. He expects to complete his PhD in late 2006.
Maurice on the Moon is a science fiction adventure about a young boy growing up in a frontier mining town. Maurice Haberman's father works for the mining company that owns the town, his mother is a ecologist, both of them work hard to earn a living in the little town of Gassendi LEX that has been carved out of a crater rim on the edge of an ancient lunar sea of frozen lava. Maurice's parents have come to the frontier to escape the crowded, desperate conditions of Earth. They have worked for years for a chance to earn their citizenship in their adopted country; a dream that seems to be within reach at last.
Maurice doesn't share his parents enthusiasm for his adopted homeland. In fact, he hates the Moon and dreams of nothing but leaving Gassendi LEX forever. Living in a lunar colony isn't easy, the work is hard and everyone has to do his part to help the family survive. Besides doing well in class, Maurice has many chores at home, and he is expected to help his father with prospecting work for the mining company when he isn't in school. To make everything worse, the Earth hangs like a jewel in the black lunar sky, spinning in place just out of reach with the promise of everything Maurice wants, but can never have.
The Earth is everything the Moon is not - a colorful world where the air is free and water falls from the sky. A world where plants grow wild and no one charges you to breathe the oxygen they produce. A world where the sun's light isn't full of deadly radiation and no one needs to put on a pressure suit and helmet just to go outside. Maurice will do almost anything to get to the Earth, even stealing a ride on a space liner doesn't seem out of the question. But leaving home isn't as easy as it seems, and paradise doesn't always keep its promises!
Maurice's mother is shanghaied to Mars to help save a dying colony on the verge of ecological collapse. On the way out to Mars, Maurice gets stuck aboard ship with Shannon Kappel, daughter of a scientist recruited from the Earth country of Ireland to help save the Mars colony. Sparks fly as the girl from Ireland meets our boy from the Moon. Once they arrive on Mars, everyone believes that there must be a simple scientific answer to the colony's troubles, but Maurice sees spies around every corner and saboteurs behind each new disaster. Maurice drags Shannon into the chase as they explore the red planet together. No one else seems to believe in the existence of the saboteur, but Maurice could be right - dead right!
Maurice is back from Mars and off for a well deserved vacation with his friend Jim at summer camp - on the lunar far side! The culture of the far side is vastly different from the Lunar Union, and Maurice has trouble fitting in. The troubles only increase when Shannon Kappel shows up at camp too! Jim is convinced that Shannon is there because Maurice's parents are trying to set him up with a good match - and arranged marriages aren't uncommon on the lunar frontier! Danger threatens and the trio is drawn into a web of intrigue and adventure as an interplanetary mining company tries to take over the fiercely independent lunar colony of Zalinski - and their local industry, making the fastest computers in the solar system. But the NovaLunik computer company has a secret much more sinister than a super fast computer chip - and they won't hesitate to kill to protect it!