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Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, Emily Janice Card
Ben BovaUnabridged — 15 hours, 25 minutes
Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki, Emily Janice Card
Ben BovaUnabridged — 15 hours, 25 minutes
Ben Bova's extraordinary Moonbase Saga continues with a breathtaking near-future adventure rich in character and incident. Seven years after the indomitable Doug Stavenger has realized his cherished dream of establishing a colony on the inhospitable lunar surface, Moonbase is a thriving community, a marvel of scientific achievement created and supported by nanotechnology: virus-sized machines that can build, cure, and destroy. But nanotechnology has been declared illegal by the home planet's leaders, and a powerful despot is determined to lay claim to Stavenger's peaceful city-or obliterate it, if necessary. The people of Moonbase, a colony with no arms or military, must now defend themselves from earthborn aggression with the only weapon at their disposal: the astonishing technology that sustains their endangered home.
Ben Bova continues his story of colonization with Moonwar, in which a small group of scientists and technicians successfully secede from an Earth determined to suppress their research, by force if necessary. It's one of Bova's most convincing near-future extrapolations.
—Don D'Ammassa
Though riddled with SF clichs and stock characters, Bova's sequel to Moonrise is nonetheless an exciting high-tech adventure that puts the fledgling lunar colony known as Moonbase in dire jeopardy as political forces seek either to wrest control of it or to destroy it. Nanotechnology has been outlawed on Earth, but it is essential to Moonbase's functioning. The colony's leader, Douglas Stavenger, whose body is full of benevolent nanotech, must find a nonviolent way to foil the United Nations' Peacekeeper forces long enough for the base to be declared an independent nation and thus one that can legally continue to work with the outlawed technology. Georges Faure, Secretary-General of the U.N., has his own greedy plans for Moonbase, but he succumbs to the sexual charms of Edith Elgin, a gorgeous reporter who wheedles her way onto the U.N.'s troopship and then into the base itself. Her dispatches blow open the truth about what is occurring on the besieged colony, even as her presence creates a romantic dilemma for Doug. Spies, fanatics, sexy women and broad expanses abound as technology and good planning overcome brute force and canny capitalists. Readers who don't mind female reporters who "give some head to get ahead" and U.N. directors who proclaim that "resistance is futile" should find Bova's latest romp on the moon exciting and fun. (Feb.)
Defying a UN directive to cease their nanotechnology research and surrender control of their lunar colony, the citizens of Moonbase choose a desperate course of action to ensure their freedomor their total destruction. This sequel to Moonrise (LJ 12/96) presents a countdown to confrontation between a fully equipped military force from Earth and a weaponless community of idealists armed only with their wits and determination. Veteran sf author Bova remains one of the genre's best at creating suspense-filled high-tech dramas; only his unfortunate tendency toward ethnic stereotyping detracts from this otherwise top-notch story. A solid, though flawed, purchase for most sf collections.
Having done all the stage-setting for his near/medium-future lunar saga in Moonrise (1996), Bova slams right into the action in this declaration-of-independence sequel. The fanatical UN Secretary General, Georges Faure, determined to destroy Moonbase and the nanotechnology he has successfully outlawed on Earth, dispatches a force of Peacekeepers to land on the Moon and occupy the defenseless facility. But whiz-kid Doug Stavenger, his body full of nanomachines that preserve and keep him healthy, has other ideas. So, as brilliant but irascible nanomachines designer/programmer Wilhelm Zimmerman protects Moonbase from the UN troops, Doug slowly uncovers the complicated plotting behind Faure's move: A small group of zealots will do anything to prevent the growth of nanotechnology; the chairman of the Masterson Corporation, owner of Moonbase, wants to be mega-rich; and the owner of the powerful Yamagata Corporation has overwhelming personal reasons for wanting control of Moonbase. The first UN attack is defeated, but another will surely follow, while a saboteur prowls Moonbase and an assassin with a grudge goes after Doug's mother while she's on Earth attempting to negotiate. Somehow, Doug must swing public opinion behind Moonbase, its bid for independence, and its pro- nanotechnology stance, and defend it against the fanatical killers who would murder everybody on the Moon rather than allow Moonbase to survive. Rousing, inventive, persuasively knotty, with loads of tension and excitement: overall, far more involving and gripping than the previous volume.
| BN ID: | 2940169719208 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/17/2012 |
| Series: | Grand Tour Series , #6 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
"L-I's out."
The chief comm tech looked up sharply from her keyboard. "Try the backup."
"Already did," said the man at the console beside her. "No joy. Every frequency's dead."
The third communications technician, seated at the console on the chief's other side, tapped one keypad after another. His display screen showed nothing but streaks of meaningless hash.
"They did it," he confirmed. "They pulled the plug."
The other controllers and technicians left their own stations and drifted tensely, expectantly toward the communications consoles. Their consoles flickered and glowed, untended. The big electronic walIscreen that displayed all of Moonbase's systems hung above them as if nothing unusual was happening.
The chief pushed back her little wheeled chair slightly. "They did it right when they said they would, didn't they?"
"That's it, then," said the male comm tech. "We're at war."
No one replied. No one knew what to say. The knot of men and women stood there in uneasy silence. The only sounds were the low humming of the electronics consoles and the soft whisper of the air-circulation fans.
"I'd better pipe the word up to the boss," the chief technician muttered, reaching toward her keyboard. She started to peck at the keys.
I "Shit!" she snapped. "I broke a fingernail."
Douglas Stavenger stood at the crest of Wodjohowitcz Pass, listening to the silence. Inside the base there were always voices, human or synthesized, and the constant background hum of electricalmachinery. Out here, up on the mountains that ringed the giant crater Alphonsus, he heard nothing but his own breathing-and the faint, comforting whir of the spacesuit's air-circulation fans.
Good noise, he thought, smiling to himself When that noise stops, so does your breathing.
He had climbed down from the tractor near the spot where the plaque was, a small square of gold riveted onto the rock face, dedicated to his father:
On this spot Paul Stavenger chose to die, in order to save the men and women of Moonbase.
Doug had not driven up to the pass for the sake of nostalgia, however. He wanted to take a long, hard look at Moonbase. Not the schematic diagrams or electronic charts, but the real thing, the actual base as it stood beneath the uncompromising stars.
Everyone in the base thought they were safe and snug, dug into the side of the ringwall mountain they had named Yeager. Sheltered by solid rock, they had little fear of the dangers up on the airless surface, where the crater floor was bathed in hard radiation and the temperature could swing four hundred degrees between daylight and night, between sunshine and shadow.
But Doug saw how terribly vulnerable they all were. They had protected themselves against the forces of nature, true enough. But now they were threatened with destruction by the hand of war.
Doug looked out at the solar farm, thousands of acres of dark solar cells that greedily drank in sunlight and converted it noiselessly into the electricity the base needed the way a man needs blood. They could be blown to dust by conventional explosives, or blasted into uselessness by the radiation pulse from a nuclear warhead.
Even easier, he realized, an enemy could knock out the radiators and we'd all stew underground in our own waste heat until we either surrendered or collapsed from heat exhaustion.
His eyes travelled to the rocket pads. They were empty now that the morning's lunar transfer vehicle had loaded up and departed. Beyond, he saw the geodesic dome that sheltered the construction pad; inside it, a half-built Clippership was being assembled by virus-sized nanomachines that converted meteoric carbon dust into hard, strong structure of pure diamond. How could we protect spacecraft sitting out on the pads? We can't shelter them and we don't have the facilities to bring them underground. That dome is no protection against missiles or even bullets.
He looked farther out across the crater floor, to where the mass launcher stretched its lean dark metallic finger to the horizon. A single warhead could wreck it forever, Doug knew.
Well, we can't beat them in a shooting war, he told himself. That's certain.
Turning his gaze back to the edge of the solar farm, Doug saw the dark slick-looking film on the ground where the nanomachines were busily converting the silicon and metals of the lunar regolith into more solar cells.
That's what this war is all about, he knew. Nanoma chines. And he thought he could feel the trillions of nanos inside his own body.
If I go back to Earth I'll be a marked man. Some crackpot nanoluddite will murder me, just the way they've killed so many others. But if the only way to avert this war is to close Moonbase, where else can I go?
His mind churning, he turned again and looked down at the deep pit that would one day be Moonbase's grand plaza. If we ever get to finish it.
All construction jobs begin by digging a hole in the ground, he said to himself. It doesn't make any difference if you're on the Moon or the Earth.
Under the brilliant illumination of powerful lamps spaced around the edge of the pit, front-loaders were working soundlessly in the lunar vacuum, scooping up dirt and dumping their loads onto the waiting trucks. Clouds of fine lunar dust hung over the machines, scattering the lamplight like fog. The first time I've seen mist on the Moon, Doug mused. Not a molecule of water in that haze, though.
All of the machinery was controlled by operators sitting safely inside their stations at the control center. Only a handful of construction workers were actually out on the floor of the crater Alphonsus.
I should be inside, too, Doug told himself. The deadline comes up right about now. I ought to be inside facing the music instead of out here, trying to avoid it all.
In the seven years of his exile on the Moon, Doug had always come out to the lunar surface when he had a problem that ached in him. The Moon's harsh, airless otherworldliness concentrated his mind on the essentials: life or death, survival or extinction. He never failed to be thrilled by the stark grandeur of the lunar landscape. But now he felt fear, instead. Fear that Moonbase would be closed, its potential for opening the space frontier forever lost. Fear that he would have to return to the Earth, where fanatic assassins awaited him.
And anger, deep smoldering anger that men would threaten war and destruction in their ignorant, blind zeal to eradicate Moonbase...
Moonwar. Copyright © by B. Bova. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
