Building Harlequin's Moon
Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper
Tor (June 2005)
Biases:
I stopped being an avid fan of Larry Niven's SF about the time
his fiction lost any playful element. I'd put this about 30 years ago.
Eventually, my disenchantment got to the point where I just stopped
reading his fiction. I have not, for example, read _Achilles Choice_
or _Rainbow Mars_. The few recent works I have read (_Ringworld's
Children_ and _The Burning Tower_) were not to my taste.
Brenda Cooper, I had no knowledge of. As far as I can tell, she
has worked in short lengths before this novel and I am out of touch with
modern short SF.
I don't have high hopes for Big Name/Little Name collaborations.
Review:
Brenda Cooper is a name that I will keep an eye out for when I
shop for books. I've read recent Niven by himself and recent Niven with
Pournelle and neither one was like this book. Cooper must be the critical
factor.
Remember when Niven books were _fun_? When his protagonists,
even the ones trapped in miserable, rigidly hierarchical societies like
_A Gift from Earth_ or _A World Out of Time_ could go do some great
thing? When the sour, miserabilist zeitgeist of the late 20th hadn't
entirely taken over Niven's books? This book is a return to those days.
The initial situation is straightforward:
A starship develops a fault in its propulsion system, a
fault that threatens to kill its passengers before they reach their
destination. Luckily for them, there is a star close enough to
their flight path that they can stop there, although this will
use up most of their antimatter. Unluckily for them, there's a
reason why they were headed for the more distance system. Because
they fear (with good reason) the hazards of unbridled nanotech and
AI, they did not take those technologies with them, preferring less
powerful but more easily controlled technologies. Systems whose
worlds can be tamed with those technologies are rare and the one
they are in is not one of them. This system does not even have a
world as friendly as Mars or Venus: a star grazing gas giant has
cleared out the inner system.
The strategy that they decide on is to temporarily
terraform one of the moons of the gas giant Harlequin, a moon
they call Selene. They will raise children on this moon, an
entire population whose only reason for existing is to provide
an economy large enough to support an antimatter facility to
refuel the starship. Once the ship is fueled, it and the original
crew (1) will leave. The Moon Born will be left behind, to die
when the fragile ecology of Selene collapses in (at best) a few
centuries. Obviously, this is not optimal from the perspective
of the Moon Born. The crew plans to deal with potential unrest
in two ways: they will keep the Moon Born as ignorant as possible,
given what they need to be able to do, and the crew carefully keep
tight control on many technologies, including weapons.
Early in the final phase of the program (2), relations between
the crew and the Moon Born are cordial enough that a select few of
the Moon Born are chosen as potential leaders. Although this plan goes
south fairly soon, one of the students, Rachel, finds herself placed in
a unique position to understand the probable fate of her people and to
struggle to avoid it. Since Selene is so very fragile and since the
crew have all the guns (real or potential), armed struggle is unlikely
to end well for the Moon Born. If Rachel is to succeed, she will have
to find some non-violent way to convince her masters not to abandon
their children to eventual extinction. She will also have to prevent,
to the extent she can, the sort of general uprising that could lead to
a collapse of the human-maintained systems on Selene.
This reminded me a lot of _A Gift from Earth_ except that where
in AGfE land was rare, in this novel it is very fragile as well. A
glorious revolution in this setting is likely to end with all the rebels
choking on rarefied air or killed by a flare, so the problem Rachel faces
is quite a bit more difficult than the one Matthew Keller had to deal with.
As well, the antagonists in AGfE were motivated by mere greed for position
and longevity, whereas the crew in this book believes that they may well
be the last humans alive. Even decent people might commit horrible
acts if they thought the alternative was extinction for the human race.
This book is not with flaws. Some of the phrasing near the
beginning is clumsy and there are a number of what look to me like
outright scientific errors, including one that is vital to the plot
(although it is actually only important that people believe it, not
that it be true). That said, I think the last time I read a book
with Niven's name on it that I enjoyed this much was in the late
1970s. It isn't just that I had very low expectations: I had very
low expectations for _The Burning Tower_ and somehow that book failed to
live up to them. I think this was actually a fun book, one with
(mostly) decent people trying to accomplish (mostly) worthwhile
goals.
James Nicoll
1: Whose lives are extended by two of the applications of nanotech
the crew is willing to use: cold sleep and immortality.
2: The first phase takes 60,000 years and almost no pages, since living
humans are not really involved. Terraforming is slow.
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