Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper, Building Harlequin's Moon
(Tor, 2005)
Humans are fleeing an Earth that's been taken over by artificial intelligence and nano-technology, and the starship John Glenn is one of three carrying humanity's last hope -- colonists in cold sleep -- to a new home in the stars. But something went wrong with the ship and instead of meeting its two companions on the far-off planet Ymir as planned, its captain and crew brought it limping into a different star system, one with no earthlike planets, only several gas giants, including one they name Harlequin for its mottled surface. Here, the five members of the High Council and their subordinates on the Council of Humanity hatch a plan with a 60,000-year timescale. Working a few at a time in shifts while the rest are in nano-assisted cold sleep, they will create a habitable moon, Selene, by crashing together several of Harlequin's moonlets, terraform it, people it with a few generations of colonists and their offspring, and use these Children of Selene to build a particle accelerator to generate enough antimatter to fuel their continued journey to Ymir.
That's the premise behind Niven and Cooper's Building Harlequin's Moon. It's an interesting storyline with plenty of potential, to which the book only partially lives up.
The story is told through the eyes of two characters: Gabriel, the head terraformer, and Rachel, one of the moonborn Children. As the story unfolds, numerous flaws in the Council's plan are quickly revealed to the reader -- of course, those involved in the tale are much slower to see them. The moon is inherently unstable, prone to seismic activity and atmosphere leakage, as well as frequent radioactive flares from the system's sun. There's no room on the ship for the Children, so they'll be left behind on Selene to fend for themselves once the John Glenn leaves. The Children are in effect slaves, working for the Council's goals but with no voice in their own destinies, which creates all kinds of dynamic and emotional tensions between the two groups.
What could have been an immensely satisfying tale of speculative fiction becomes, in the hands of the two authors, something less. The word Harlequin in the title is more than a bit ironic, because the plot and its execution bear more than a passing resemblance to a romance novel. The young, intelligent, sort-of-orphaned Rachel is taken into the vaguely threatening, older and more powerful Gabriel's chateau . . . er, ship . . . and his society, where she meets some who hate her for who she is, and others below-stairs who help her. She learns things she shouldn't learn and has vague troubling fantasies of love with this man who is clearly out of her league.
In other words, it bears little resemblance to anything else Niven has written or co-written. It seems likely that Niven provided the science and Cooper the human elements of the story, and it's not necessarily a marriage made in the heavens. Niven's best characters are fairly one-dimensional swashbucklers like Louis Wu and Beowulf Schaeffer, cynical antiheroes who succeed in their improbable adventures largely through luck and a strong dose of cool logic. The characters in Harlequin strangely remain similarly one-dimensional, although the story attempts to be at least somewhat character driven. Rachel is almost disgustingly altruistic and true-hearted. Gabriel is a typical engineer who can't deal with messy human complications. High Councilor Kyu is a mystical Earth-mother type, and Rachel's nemesis Ma Liren is an authoritarian with an unresolved Electra complex. Other minor characters are trotted onstage as needed, rather like the bit parts in Star Trek, and have even less-developed personalities than the main actors. The long time-frame requires cold-sleep, but its use means major discontinuities and gaps in the tale and make the denoument, in particular, seem a disjointed afterthought.
Harlequin is the only Niven-associated book I've ever had to force myself to keep reading. By the end, the resolution, though devoid of surprise, was admittedly moving, but I'm not sure it was worth the effort. That is a shame, because Harlequin deals with some big themes, particularly that of a one-sided power relationship between a group of exploiters and their subjects. It's too bad it was so poorly executed.
