Moonrise Ben Bova 1996 Avon/Eos Books 0-380-78697-4 560 pages Moonwar Ben Bova 1998 Avon/Eos Books 0-380-97303-0 388 pages Paul Stavenger dreams only of the Moon. He struggles to build Moonbase, the first permanent manned station on the Moon. It's still deep in the red, and his company, Masterson Corp., is planning to close the base. The only way to make Moonbase profitable is to use nanotechnology. The citizens of the Earth are wary of nanotech---they fear the "grey goo" problem (nanotechs getting loose and taking over the world), while a more and more powerful right wing uses this fear to gain power with the new One World Government: the U.N. Paul has a lot of enemies. Hordes of them, in fact, including his stepson Greg. Greg is more than a little deranged, and Johanna, his mother and Paul's wife, is the only thing that keeps him from hurting his father. The boardroom struggles at Masterson frequently overshadow Paul's projects, but still he's on Mars as much as he can, stopping only to father a son, Douglas, who shares his father's dashing good looks, winning charm, and single-minded drive to make Moonbase profitable. But the promises of Moonbase, the colony-founding urge, keeps Paul and Douglas on the edge and taking risks. Those risks end up jeopardizing both him and the future of humanity. Even though these are two different books, they're really the same story with a two-year pause between publication of the chapters. _Moonrise_ almost seems like the first two books put together, with a humdinger finale in the middle followed by another story that takes place a few years after the last one stopped. _Moonwar_ keeps up the pace, although the narrative focuses on different characters and the political situation has shifted somewhat. My wife summed up my reaction perfectly: "Dallas" in space. These are Texas-sized people with Texas-sized money and ambition, yet they have all the problems typically found in soap operas, including familial betrayal, corporate backstabbing, and the occasional cold-blooded murder. The good guys and the bad guys are delineated in black and right [sic]. The futurists and the technologists wear white ten-gallon hats, while the conservative, religious One-Worlders might as well call themselves "Black Dan" and carry on with prostitutes. There's nothing wrong with Dallas in Space---I had fun reading this and wasn't worried that I pretty much knew who was going win each round. The Stavenger men are inevitably smarter and suaver than everyone around them, with their two flaws being single-minded and too honorable. Douglas has to fight an entire war without killing anyone---how's that for the high moral ground! The characters are as simple as the thematic structure; I kept wondering when Bova would whip off the masks and reveal that characters' motivations were more than "I want to live on the Moon," "I love my sons," "I'm totally nuts," or "I'm a bitter former employee," but Bova never made them more complex. In this way, I'm reminded of Henlein's later juveniles---simple plots and characters powered by neat science ideas and some amount of political soapboxing. So, really, the story should be carried on its envisioning of the future of humanity in space. Bova feels that nanotech is the solution for NASA's problem, which is that it takes five astronauts to grow food for four astronauts. I think he's right, but the nanotech is as simply treated as the characters. The nanotech devices are real plot devices, displaying far more intelligence than they could possibly have. Case in point: they "know" that Douglas Stavenger's brain needs to be kept alive at all costs, so they make the (very intelligent) decision that they should therefore abandon keeping his lungs working during a serious trauma (a near-fatal stabbing). I know seasoned doctors who wouldn't be able to make that decision, but those tiny little guys with a few bytes of memory figured it out. I wish I could write code that smart. Real nanotech is going to be mind-blowing (assuming the energy budget can be balanced---all that molecule twiddling is going to cost serious power). Neal Stephenson explores the concepts best in _The Diamond Age_, but even then I think he hasn't gone far enough. Bova thinks very conventionally. Another comment about Bova's future: Having worked in science research for many years, I should point out that there are very few engineering projects that go right the first time. In fact, if your experiment works the first time you try it, you've probably done something obviously wrong. Likewise with programming: the idea that anyone could get a program right the first time pretty much never happens, and these programs interact with *real life*. The bits of software that deal with the real world which is filled with ugly things like latency, noise, variable environments, and human error are called "device drivers" and are always the hardest and least-reliable pieces of software during beta-tests. Yet, throughout both of these books, Stavenger's first tries at everything never go wrong---well, just once, but it turned out to be an advantage. Bova must have never stayed up all night debugging 40 lines of code. Still, all these complaints aside, I liked these books. The story, saddled with obvious predictions about the future and simplified characters, rests on a strong, twisty plot that really moves. The bitter ex-employee decides, casually, that he'll murder someone, and boom---we witness the murder and the Stavengers reeling from the consequences, and we're on to the next hang-up. And, of, course, I want to move to the Moon. Bova is writing about a world where traveling to an orbiting space station is as easy as taking a plane flight. Reading about that world is one step away from living it, and Bova paints it all in bright colors. It's fun, but mindless. Your milage may vary, but Wolff says check it out from your local library.