Building Harlequin's Moon

"Niven and Cooper have crafted a multigenerational, star-spanning epic with intriguing, fast-paced action. Against a backdrop of mind-boggling technology, the authors ask important questions about how far science should go and its impact on social structures and human rights. Niven and Cooper are playing God on a grand scale."

"Fans of both hard and softer, psychological SF will welcome veteran Niven and newcomer Cooper's well-written tale...Niven and Cooper provide complicated characters, particularly the AI, which struggle with realistic moral dilemmas."

"Exploiting Niven's classic flare for world building, he and Cooper craft an entertaining epic with subtexts concerning cultural obsessiveness and the fear and worship of science."

"Recent astronomy hints at a beautiful but stark vision of the solar systems around us. Building Harlequin's Moon is the best fiction I've seen based on this vision."

"Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper's colonization novel is a hugely ambitious, meticulously rendered feast for both head and heart. I can't wait to see what they do next!"

"Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper have accomplished that most difficult of tasks, a novel full of real, hard science but character-driven from the first page. The scope is enormous, but the focus is intimate, with characters who live and breathe. A marvelous read!"

"Building Harlequin's Moon is a big tale, well told. Wonderful world-building and characters you can care about."

The first interstellar ship, John Glenn, fled a solar system populated by rogue AIs and machine/human hybrids, threatened by too much nanotechnology, and rife with political dangers. The John Glenn's crew intended to terraform the nearly pristine planet Ymir in hopes of creating a utopian society that will limit intelligent technology, but by some miscalculation they have landed in the wrong system. Short on the antimatter needed to continue to Ymir, they must shape nearby planet Harlequin's moon, Selene, into a new, temporary home and rebuild their store of antimatter through decades of terraforming.

Gabriel, the head terraformer, now leads this nearly impossible task; his primary tools the uneducated and nearly illiterate children of the original colonists, born and bred to build Harlequin's moon into a virtual antimatter factory. With no concept of the future and with life defined as duty, one girl, Rachel Vanowen, begins to ask herself, what will become of the children of Selene once the terraforming is complete?