Customer Reviews

Building Harlequin's Moon

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

It would be easy to conclude that Niven did the "science-y bits," while Cooper did most of the heavy lifting regarding plot, characterization, and actual writing. But that would be presumptuous; sometimes a collaboration can inspire a writer to try harder in areas of former weakness.

It doesn't matter. This collaboration, however it functioned, has produced a solid success. There is Big Science here, and there is character-driven drama here. And because the characters are challenged with -- and changed by -- problems that rise directly from the scientific premises, the whole thing works wonderfully and nearly seamlessly as a grand science-fiction story.

The John Glenn is a sublight-speed colony ship, its passengers in cryogenic sleep. When a drive failure prevents the continuation of their journey, they must stop in an inhospitable star system, awaken enough people to create a temporary colony, and over the course of generations create a society whose sole function is to build the means to repair the ship for its continued journey.

This is the story of Rachel, a third Generation "Moon Born," a young woman who doesn't know that she is a slave. And it's the story of Gabriel, the master terraformer who created Selene out of dead rocks and raw biomass, one of the Glenn's crew who are guiding Rachel and her kin toward a future when they will help build the tools that will enable the ship to leave the Moon Born behind on an unstable manufactured planet.

"Building Harlequin's Moon" is populated with a roster of interesting and disparate characters: "Astronaut," the ship's AI, who wants to learn and grow but whose boundaries are constrained by the colonists' fear of unrestrained technology that caused them to flee a now-dead Earth; Andrew, the Moon Born rebel; Treesa, who woke from cold sleep "disaffected" -- crazy, some would say -- but who becomes one of the keys through which Rachel begins to learn the true nature of the purpose-built society she has been born into.

The Earth Born characters' lives are extended and renewed through the nanotechnology that underlies their cryogenic process, and this becomes both a narrative device that allows long spans of time and change to be covered, and a central source of conflict between Earth Born and Moon Born.

Such conflicts are many and profound. For the Earth Born, the issue is no less than the survival of the human race: they *must* reach a habitable planet and start a successful colony; they may be the only humans left in the universe, and their ship the only means to survive. Yet the moral and ethical conflicts that increasingly divide the crew of the John Glenn lead them in many directions, taking multiple sides.

At the same time, as Rachel learns and shares the true nature of Moon Born's existence, they too become divided and conflicted. Can the Moon Born somehow support the goals of the Earth Born without sacrificing their own future?

With engaging characters, several exciting adventure vignettes, vital moral questions about the balance between species survival and ethical necessities, all set against a spectacular backdrop of planet-building, social engineering, and entire human lifetimes, "Building Harlequin's Moon" is more than just space opera. It's a dramatic science fiction novel that entertains, maintains focus and pace, and best of all creates believable and important problems for its characters and then shows us how they solve them.

This is a stand-alone novel (although a sequel would be welcome).

Why not five stars?
The writing is occasionally stiff and a bit awkward, but never unreadable or embarrassing. The lack of backstory for the important Earth Born characters is missed, as is more detail on the formative stages of the Selene society. None of these problems is severe; I just don't think it's the "all-time great" novel I would give five stars to.

RichC

This is a GREAT BIG IDEA book.

The concept that a small group of isolated people would someday be able to create a small inhabitable moon is a startling to say the least. Then to attempt to explain a great deal of human history and behavior based on the experiences of a single woman in a small society is extremely gutsy. To try to resolve all the logical plot threads generated by the first two concepts in 400 pages is bold to the point of crazy.

Yes, the writing is a bit stilted in places and the characters are a bit thin, but I'm willing to live with that given the scope of topics the book attempts to cover.

My big gripe? The ending. Much of the book is based on a false assumption that I'd been wondering about for the entire book, the characters discover this assumption at the end and then make everything okay with far too little effort.

I strongly agree with the reviewers who say that this is Brenda Cooper's book rather than a join collaboration with Niven. I actually view this as a positive because this is a pretty good first novel and I'm very interested in seeing what Ms. Cooper writes in the future.

_____________________________________________

The setup -- Earth's first starship breaks down, limps to a desolate extrasolar system for repairs -- is classic, and nicely done. The Harlequin system is typical of recent extrasolar-planet discoveries -- a huge gas-giant has 'eaten' all the inner system as it spiralled in towards its sun, leaving no planets in the life-zone. The crew of the "John Glenn" need to refuel their ship, and need a place to build an antimatter factory, and a workforce to staff it. So they mash a buncha little moons together to build Selene, Harlequin's moon, as the novel opens, setting up the conflict between the demigod Earthborn and their Moonborn servants. Who are also their *children*, an unconvincing detail in the ensuing dustups -- where are the protective parents when the High Council gets high-handed?

OK, some of them were refrozen, in the starship's corpsicle capsules, but this trampling on basic human nature is slipped by quickly, in hopes we won't notice....

The Earthly backstory -- AI revolts! and a gray-goo nano meltdown -- is generic, and not too convincing. And, clearly the "John Glenn" didn't really need to build such an elaborate habitat. I mean, terraform a moon-mash? [1] C'mon. Why not inflate an asteroid, or build an SF-standard O'Neill habitat? Not to mention the Council's REALLY STUPID IDEA of where to build their antimatter factory. But that would have made a more-generic novel, so let's let it slide....

Anyway, I had fun reading Harlequin's. The book recaptures some of the joie de vivre of the classic Niven stories we all know and love. It's definitely a first novel, but an unusually good one. Recommended for old-fashioned space-adventure fans.

The writing here is basically by Cooper, but there are enough Niven touches that it's clear he was substantially involved. They've previously collaborated on short fiction, notably the taut thriller "Ice and Mirrors". She's a writer to watch.


[1] This qualifies as a genuinely Neat Idea, but shoehorning it into the story is a glaring first-novel rough spot. Or maybe I'm being too picky?

Review copyright ©2005 by Peter D. Tillman

Rachel is a slave. She doesn't know it but she is a disposable human, bred for the work of getting the space ship John Glenn back on its way, and when the job is finished she will be discarded. All of her people share this plight and they can't be allowed to learn the truth.

When the John Glenn suffered damage en route to its original destination, the captain was forced to divert to a nearby solar system to make repairs. The repairs include refueling the ship with antimatter, which requires building a collider, which requires a manufacturing base, which requires a world populated by workers. Gabriel, the chief terraformer of the John Glenn crew, takes up the task of making a world from the moons of a gas giant named Harlequin (thus the title of the book). Gabriel awakens and returns to frozen storage many times before the moon he fashions is ready for people. When the moon is ready, a selection of Earth-born are awakened to bear children who will become the Moon-born.

Once you buy into the setup of this book, the story unfolds wonderfully. Behind the human drama, the book includes a showcase of technology required to carve an existence for humans out of the void. A large cast of believable characters (perhaps a bit too large) struggle over the fate of the Moon-born. Alliances shift and evolve along with the civilization on Harlequin's moon to a dramatic showdown that threatens both populations. Rachel, a reluctant leader and reluctant rebel, must at last make a stand as the only person who can bridge the two worlds.

The ending is not really a surprise, if you think about it, but getting there is all the fun in this book. It is strong on human politics, mild sexuality, and technology but it might not be entirely satisfying for those who thrive on military action and huge space battles. Near the end, a number of Moon-born characters are introduced and I struggled to keep up with who is who. Still, there is plenty for the science fiction enthusiast to enjoy and I recommend this book for all readers 14 or older.

Reviewed by Hugh Mannfield at [...]

I found the book interesting and well-written, with a fascinating premise, interesting characters, and a solid conflict at the core of the book. I love to read books about slower-than-light starships, since they have a better sense of realism for me than the magic hyperdrives of Star Trek; I'm fascinated by the difficulties of dealing with the real world science and engineering of starflight. This book had a very interesting hard-science background, and an engaging and likable female protagonist.
The major plot driver in the book is that the crew of a disabled starship arrrives in an inhostpitable solar system, with no habitible planets or moons, only gas giant planets. They decide to build and terraform a moon on which to make a collider to manufacture antimatter to refuel their ship, and to populate that moon with a work crew of their own children, who they would be unable to bring along on the continuation on the trip, and thus will have to abandon on a moon that would lose its atmosphere in a century or so. The title is literal, and the moon on which most of the action takes place is actually built by the starship crew out of planetisimals and tiny moonlets. With that said, although it's a fascinating concept, it's hard to believe that the starship crew would chose this approach rather than another way of manufacturing antimatter, such as the solution that they ultimately do adopt at the end of the book.
I found the body of the book fascinating, but the ending was very much an anticlimax. A major conflict is set up between the moon-born and the starship crew, but the resolution just fizzles, as the main antagonist decides she was wrong, and everybody involved decides to be nice and work together. They could have decided to work together from Chapter one; it would have saved a lot of pages.
Still, a great first novel for Cooper, and an interesting worldbuilding exercise for hard-SF afficionados.

I was really disappointed in this book. I've read just about everything that Niven has written or collaborated on, and this book just didn't match his usual standard. The book clearly focused on pulling the particular stings of the young reader. Sometimes this works even for adults, when you know it up front, but I don't think it worked this time.
Apparently Cooper wrote the vast majority of the text. I just couldn't relate to the main character. For the first time ever (for a Niven book) after reading over half the book, found I just wasn't that interested in her or the story, and just skipped to the end.

I'm impressed by this book. I picked it up, not honestly expecting
much but it turned out to be well thought out. Plus along the
way of telling a good story it touches on some real problems the human
species faces. As a young man I recall spending quite a bit of time
thinking and worrying about the possible, soon-to-be, new synthetic
intelligences and what the likely final consequences of that will be.

For some reason the issue rarely crosses my mind any more -- not
because I don't think it's a problem but more because it seems
far away, insolveable, and, mostly, because I'm tired of thinking
about it. Still it's refreshing to see the question taken seriously.

I also very much liked the way the authors take a typical stellar
system, at least what looks like may be typical based on the limited
data we have so far, and imagined a way in which people just might
be able to live there.

Mr. Niven set forth this book to explore concepts. The main antagonist is an extremist. People are put in a condition of servitude and, eventually, terrorized. He asks us to identify with a local population with which the ship dwellers do not. That feels all kind of backwards.

The scientific bits are a bit shallow. Cold sleep is used, nano technology, artificial intelligence, and antimatter (Cripes!) are combined to provide a framework for the story. No theory is advanced to help these along.
I feel a bit miffed that he asked me to take the antimatter part of the tale seriously. After all, antimatter is not a power source, as he implies, but seems to me to be more about power storage. Antimatter creation takes enormous amounts of energy. Antimatter storage takes enormous power.
I also fail to understand why nano technology is only useful when coming out of cold storage. Perhaps Nasa Tech Briefs had an article stating that nanobots should swim better near the freezing temperature of water?

There's human flight. Regrettably, it is not as cool as the armor with jump jets described in Starship Troopers.

This book was contrived to place character elements into scenarios and play with attitudes and examine behaviors. If you accept the book at that level, fine. It is a good read, regardless.

If you are looking for logical and hard science fiction, look elsewhere.

Plowing (pun intended) through the gardening in the first third of the book was tedious. I can identify cacti, don't be giving me gruesome details on trees and flowers and fertilizer.

I'm a major Niven fan, but this was just dull, dull, dull at first.

Then, we have characters introduced in the last half of the book that just kind of pop in and out. No real character development or background (Shane and Star just come and go?), but at least the gardening gets left behind, pretty mu(l)ch.

Some short sections of the book were really good, but I'm not sure they outweighted the gardening part.

Not enough Niven and I think Brenda needs some more practice.

I admit, I tend to be a bit unsure when I see books with Niven's name applied with another author. Some of have been wonderful (Mote in God's Eye), some have been dissapointing(many of the Man/Kzin War books). I place this one on the higher end of the colaborations.

The main complaints I seem to see in these comments come down to two basic ideas.

(1) This is un-Niven like! Differnt perspective!
(2) Story is unrealistic. child slaves oh my!

To the former, this is not a bad thing. Niven, like any author, tends to develop certian types of characters, has certian ideals, and over time patterns form. Cooper seems to have a differnt perspective and dropped a very differnt type of character into a situation then Niven would have.

To the latter. I would not call the situation unrealistic at all. People who think that children are precious things that parents could never do such a thing to have to remember that this is NOT 20th centry america, and the author deservies serious credit for pointing that out. The modern concept of family and the value of children is very, very new and generally associated with the relative wealth we have right now.

One of the goals of science fiction to explore ideas. This means going beyond 'oh! shiney new technology!' and sometimes does requrie going back to darker times in human history like this.

If this author continues to write, I believe her books will be well worth reading. I leave it at 4 stars because some polish does feel required, but not nearly as much as many seem to be thinking.