Trailer Park Tuesday: Mooncop by Tom Gauld

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

As a long-time fan of Tom Gauld’s comics (ever since You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack came out), I’m looking forward to his latest, Mooncop, landing on my bookshelf. With a sense of humor as dry as toast (but twice as tasty), Gauld loves to poke fun at the often inflated, self-important literary canon and scientific conventions. Tom Gauld keeps the rest of us humble with his wit. Mooncop looks like more of the same: a satire of the space program (spoiler: our moon colony is a failure) and an homage to detective novels. As Wired magazine notes: “At once hilarious and achingly melancholy, [Mooncop] reads like a requiem for the future we were promised decades ago that never arrived.” The animated trailer gives a good idea of what waits for us in the pages of the book. A lonely cop on lunar duty sits around his patrol car eating donuts and coffee while waiting for his latest call to come from the dispatch center. Though it turns out to be mundane—a dog has gone missing—it seems that's exactly what we can expect in a moondust-and-crater society. Boredom and disappointment wait for us in the future. As the woman who called for police assistance says, “Living on the moon....Whatever were we thinking? It seems so silly now.” Meanwhile, her dog runs across the lunar landscape in his little protective bubble, most likely wishing he was back on Earth, too—where he could trot into a bookstore and, if he had enough dog biscuits, buy a copy of Mooncop.