Book Review: "Building Harlequin's Moon" by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper (2005)

Larry Niven is one of my favorite sci-fi authors and has been ever since I read the wonderful “Ringworld” as a child. I still haven’t read all of his books, however, so I enjoy the rare opportunity to read one I haven’t read before.

“Building Harlequin’s Moon” is yet another collaboration book from Niven. Niven is a prolific collaborator and has written many books with other authors. This book was his first time writing with Brenda Cooper.

The story of “Building Harlequin’s Moon” is almost a classic kind of science fiction story. It is the future and a group of humans have boarded the first intersteller starship, John Glenn, and fled Earth’s solar system which is now populated by rogue AIs and machine/human hybrids. The use of nanotechnology is rampant and has made Earth dangerous for humans. The John Glenn’s crew intended to terraform the nearby pristine planet of Ymir in hopes of creating a utopian society that would limit intelligent technology.

Unfortunately, some sort of miscalculation has landed the John Glenn in a different solar system and extremely low on the antimatter they need to fuel their ship and continue their journey to Ymir. They decide they will shape Selene, the moon of the nearby planet Harlequin, into a new and temporary home where they will spend decades going in and out of cryogenic sleep while they terraform the moon and rebuild their store of antimatter.

Gabriel, the head terraformer, must lead this nearly impossible task, with all the wrong materials: the wrong ships and tools, and too few resources. His primary tools are the uneducated and nearly illiterate children of the original colonists, born and bred to build Harlequin’s moon into a virtual antimatter factory.

Rachel Vanowen is one of these children. Basically a slave girl, she must do whatever the terraforming Council tells her. She knows that the Council monitors her actions from a circling vessel above Selene’s atmosphere and is responsible for everything Rachel and her people know, as well as for the food and any training they receive. It’s only when Rachel starts wondering what will happen to the people on Selene when the John Glenn leaves that things start changing for everyone.

Although the book is certainly a science fiction story, it is also a story about people. The real beauty of the storytelling here isn’t in the description of the scientific elements or the future technologies, it’s in the questions the authors ask through the characters about what it means to be human.

How do the people of the John Glenn justify creating a slave race of their own offspring just to help them build the antimatter that will eventually help them leave the children of Selene to an almost certain, eventual doom? At what point does the reluctance to use technology become an obsession rather than a choice? How does a person’s perspective of time change when you’ve been alive over 60,000 years?

The book is full of tantalizing questions about the human condition. Rachel is one of the few Moon Born (as the people who are born on Selene are called) who is allowed to fully interact with the Earth Born and the High Council (people from the John Glenn). The High Council see in Rachel someone who could one day be a leader for the Moon Born, and, thus, someone who could help them achieve their goals. However, it is the leadership qualities in Rachel that cause her to begin asking the questions about what is to become of the Moon Born when the John Glenn leaves. As she gains more and more knowledge through the help of some of the council themselves, Rachel begins to see that the Moon Born will have to force a change if they want to survive.

Adding to the complexities of the character interactions is Rachel’s mother who is an Earth Born who decided to abandon Rachel and her father and go back into suspended animation on the ship. There is also the fact that the people who go into suspended animation are rejuvenated by nanobites every time they freeze so they can live for hundreds of years awake and have lived for thousands of years in suspended animation.

The authors convincingly portray the many sides to the issues and leave the reader with a full understanding and empathy for everyone’s point of view – something that’s hard to accomplish most of the time. While the taunt story tends to fall apart a bit towards the end, it’s easy to forgive because by then we have become emotionally invested in the characters enough to want to see a satisfying ending. The authors do not let us down.

After finishing the novel I was convinced it would stand on its own and wouldn’t have a sequel. However, while doing some research for this article I discovered that they have only recently published a sequel to the story called “Harlequins Mond.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find out many details of what that story is about. I can only hope they were able to capture the same emotional qualities they captured in the first story.