Building Harlequin's Moon by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper
01/09/2005 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
pub: TOR/Forge. 400 page hardback. Price: $25.95 (US), $34.95 (CAN). ISBN: 0-765-31266-2. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.tor.com
I often have odd misgivings when it comes to joint-written books, mostly concerning which author requires the other's expertise. In a book such as 'Building Harlequin's Moon', it's possible to say that Larry Niven was supervising the science leaving Brenda Cooper more to do with the young characters. Of course, this assumption could also be wrong.
The John Glenn is the first of three starships that is crewed by people who are fed up with the way that Earth has turned out with its abundance of AIs and human/machine hybrids not to mention nanotechnology. On its flight to a Ymir, a new world, it suffers an engine fault and runs out of its fuel, anti-matter and will need to replenish before continuing. Messages are sent as it happens so the other two starships don't suffer the same fate and can go safely on to their destination.
Creating a cracking station to yield anti-matter takes some time, and they coast to a gas giant called Harlequin and terraform a moon, Selene, to support life. It isn't supposed to last long but they are there 60,000 years doing it. These people might not like what Earth had turned into but didn't seem to concerned that they could use nanotechnology to keep their High Council young and healthy to get the work done together with 'cold storage' - a hibernation technique - to keep their subjective ages relative to each other. Rather than wake too many people in cold storage, they create a human population to live on the Moon and do most of their legwork. All heavily supervised and although the write-up suggests they are nothing more than nearly illiterate slaves, this doesn't come out in the writing. When we are introduced to the Moon Born, they are at most gardeners tending to their world. One of them, Rachel is selected as a potential leader but is put cold with their terraform leader Gabriel for 20 years when a faction of the High Council led by Ma Liren decides to do things her way and intensity the work. Rachel returns to discover her boy-friend married with children, her best friend dead and a growing rebellion to how they are being treated. She also gets on friendly terms with Astronaut, the starship's AI, and Tressa, a disaffected or crazy member of the High Council who both help her to maintain some order of peace. 'Course, it doesn't last which is the whole point of the story.
It was about half-way through the book that it suddenly dawned on me that it didn't make much sense in creating humans to live on Selene. Although their dialogue doesn't sound like illiterate, neither were they hardly the people to work on the anti-matter cracking station. In fact, short of cultivating the plants, I was still at a loss for their existence. Around page 300, there was some history of Selene's development but still made little sense. Even the closing chapters indicate the cracking station didn't really need 600,000 years to create.
On some levels, there always has to be a balance between what the story is about and its under-lying structure. With the concentration on its big cast, the structure and its reasoning were either lost in the wash or simply didn't sink in as much as it should. As commented in the opening paragraph, with two writers its very hard to work out who contributed what but somewhere, the middle ground of why appears to be lost. Considering this is about a terraformed moon, there is little done to cover its actual function. The focus is just elsewhere.
No one seems concerned by the passing of time other than relatives on the other ships aren't likely to be alive when they reach Ymir. It's a shame also we never saw the Earth that they had left so we could appreciate why they thought it was a terrible place. The fact that they are also using some of the technology they also despised tends to throw odd wombles into the novel if you examine it too closely.
This isn't to say this isn't an interesting book, but only when you don't question what else is going on. Whether the book will catch the die-hard SF fans or those who just like anything Larry Niven writes, only sales will tell.
GF Willmetts |
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