Building Harlequin’s Moon-Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper

[Harriet klausner]

Building Harlequin’s Moon

Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper

Tor, June 2005, $25.95, 464 pp.

ISBN: 0765312662



In Earth’s distant future, AI’s don’t always act in a manner that will help humanity, nanotechnology is out of control; and politics make the planet a very unsafe place to live. The machines that were designed to help mankind might very well be the seeds of their own destruction. Three spaceships flee earth heading for the planet Ymir vowing to do away with the advanced technologies that brought their home world to the brink of ruin.



The John Glen had a mishap that caused them to end up in a solar system dominated by the gas giant Harlequin. Gabriel, a terraformer, creates Selene out of the various moons. When Selene is habitable the High Council has the colonists breed children that are native to Selene. Their job is to help the Earthborn to build a collidor that will gather anti-matter to power the John Glenn so they can travel to their original destination. As the moonborn, who are little more than slaves, begin to realize their ultimate fate once they are left behind, a schism opens up between the two groups that could lead to violence unless the council takes a less militant attitude and rectifies the situation.



Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper are an excellent writing team. Readers are able to see how Selene is created from an uninhabited rock into a terraformed world capable of supporting humanity. The authors concentrate on world building and characterizations so that readers are privy to the birth of a new orb and how it was done. A sequel involving the planet Ymir would satisfy many readers’ curiosity about the eventual fate of the other two ships.



Harriet Klausner

 

[Lensman]

I really had to force myself to finish this. Despite Niven's name being listed first on the cover, if you read the foreword it's clear this is mainly Cooper's story, and Niven apparently just gave her some guidence and probably a few ideas.

I found the characters uninteresting and unsympathetic, the story uninvolving, and for the first time in my life I came up with a climax that would have been much more interesting than what the author wrote.

The situation is utterly bizarre. The characters spend thousands-- or even tens of thousands-- of years building up the ecology of a tiny little world in order to avoid using A.I. and nanotech to solve the *real* problem. Okay-- but then they have to repeatedly use A.I. and nanotech to solve the problems of constructing a world too small to be really useful!

The only way I can rationalize this is to think the characters "in charge" are collectively insane. From the way the novel reads, that's entirely possible, but it makes it very hard for this reader to care about what happens to them.

Other reviewers have also criticized this for being a novel mainly about teen angst, and for being a character-driven novel in which the characters remain undeveloped and mainly uninteresting. I agree 100%.

Now, about the climax-- or more accurately, anti-climax. (Other reviewers have also criticized the resolution as being a cop-out, waving away the conflict rather than actually bringing it to a resolution.) When the climax of the novel started approaching, I looked at the large portion of the book remaining-- over 100 pages IIRC-- and decided what was approaching must be the penultimate climax, not the actual final climax of the book, because surely no author-- not even this one-- would drag out a climax for so long.

Well, guess what? I was wrong, and she did.