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To Crush the Moon | 
 enlarge | Author: Wil Mccarthy
Publisher: Spectra
Category: Book
List Price: $6.99
Buy Used: $3.00
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 282325
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 400
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 6.6 x 4.2 x 1.3
ISBN: 055358717X
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780553587173
ASIN: 055358717X
Publication Date: May 31, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: ex-library, VG+.
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Product Description
In the conclusion to this epic interstellar adventure by Nebula Award nominee Wil McCarthy, humanity stands at a crossroads as the heroes who fashioned a man-made heaven must rescue their descendants from eternal damnation….
TO CRUSH THE MOON
Once the Queendom of Sol was a glowing monument to humankind’s loftiest dreams. Ageless and immortal, its citizens lived in peaceful splendor. But as Sol buckled under the swell of an immorbid population, space itself literally ran out….
Conrad Mursk has returned to Sol on the crippled starship Newhope. His crew are the frozen refugees of a failed colony known as Barnard’s Star. A thousand years older, Mursk finds Sol on the brink of rebellion, while a fanatic necro cult is reviving death itself. Now Mursk and his lover, Captain Xiomara “Xmary” Li Weng, are sent on a final, desperate mission by King Bruno de Towaji–one of the greatest terraformers of the ages–to literally crush the moon. If they succeed, they’ll save
billions of lost souls. If they fail, they’ll strand humanity between death–and something unimaginably worse….
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 So ends the tale January 12, 2007
Y. Alekseyev (New York)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Let's not dwell too much on what others have already said too many times over: this book and this entire series is rich in future science that is both relevant and philosophically consequential. A solid "A" for that effort, even if some of Mccarty's stuff is rather implausible.
As far as the novel's literary qualities go, it is perhaps the best book of the series. All 3 books (not counting Collapsium) read like tales - somewhat reminiscent of Larry Niven's Ringworld with the adventures that the characters are involved in. It is effortlessly captivating and does a great job of instilling that sense of wonder that (in my opinion) all good science fiction is supposed to do. We marvel not only at the stuff we've encountered before - faxes, wellstone, collapsium, etc. - but also at the way the crushed moon was engineered, from its collapsed core to its strange biosphere.
The novel's main strengths are thus twofold: 1) storytelling: see above; 2) details: they are what makes science fiction convincing. Think of Herbert's Dune: it was the details such as the water-saving suits and city-wide systems that made life on a parched planet plausible; think of McDevitt's best tales of extraterrestrial archaeology: again, detail is what makes those alien worlds so eerily familiar and so believable. The same holds true here: read the novel and you'll feel like you've seen the crushed Moon and the glow of the murdered Earth. Above all, do read the novel!
Close to one of the best, and most overlooked, recent Hard SF series May 14, 2006
Richard R. Horton (Webster Groves, MO United States)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
With To Crush the Moon Wil McCarthy brings one of the most satisfying recent series of Hard SF novels to a close. This series, collectively called, perhaps, The History of the Queendom of Sol, began in 2001 with The Collapsium (itself an expansion of a 1999 novella). That novel told of brilliant scientist Bruno de Towaji, who saves the Solar System three times from the dangers of super high-tech combined with a jealous rival. The Collapsium introduced the key technologies of the series: various types of programmable matter, and matter transmission. The latter technology, combined with an editing process, allowed for practical immortality. This first book was cheeky and playful and rather Tom Swift-like in ways.
The subsequent three novels are more closely linked, and quite a bit darker in tone. By the end of The Collapsium, Bruno had married the Queen of Sol. In The Wellstone (2003) his son, Bascal, was the ringleader of a group of young people frustrated by their lack of opportunity in a world of immortals. The main character is Bascal's friend Conrad Mursk. The two of them and a large group of rebellious youngsters are exiled to Barnard's Star at the end of the book, and Lost in Transmission (2004) tells of the establishment and ultimate failure of the Barnard's Star colony. Conrad chooses to return to Sol, and To Crush the Moon is the story of what happens after his return.
The Wellstone and Lost in Transmission both had sections set thousands of years in the future, with Conrad (now called Radmer) retrieving Bruno de Towaji from self-imposed exile and returning with him to an altered Moon (now called Lune), where the last significant remnants of humanity are fighting a war with emancipated robots. Earth and the other major planets have been "Murdered". To Crush the Moon tells first of the crisis in Solar System politics that led both to the alteration and terraforming of Luna into Lune, and then to the tragic missteps resulting in the "Murder" of Earth. Conrad and Bruno are central to these events, and so are their wives, Queen Tamra and Xiomary Li Weng (Xmary). Much of this section is savvy portrayal of what seems like inevitable political problems - particularly problems dealing with fanatics who wish to restore death to society, and with the impatient returnees from various failed star colonies. Then the conclusion continues the story of the far future war on Lune, with Radmer leading Bruno de Towaji on a desperate mission to, quite literally, save humanity.
The story is satisfying on multiple levels. The scientific (and politico-economic) speculation remains scintillating. The pure adventure aspects are thrilling. The prose is clever, sardonic, successfully darkly funny even in the shadow of the deaths of billions. Conrad and Bruno are very well realized characters, though most of the remaining characters are a bit flatter. (In particular the leading women, Tamra and Xmary, never really come to life.) Lines like "Bruno was elbow-deep in wormholes. Not literally, of course - he'd lost more than one arm that way already -" are simply delights. The ultimate scope of the story is really impressive, in space, time, and theme. The ending is perhaps a mild disappointment - it's logical enough, and the reader is not cheated, but it seems just a touch off tonally.
I've truly enjoyed this series of novels, and I confess to slight puzzlement that it hasn't received more notice. For my taste, this is what 21st Century SF ought to be. (Of course there are other recent SF stories that are also "what 21st Century SF ought to be", such as Charles Stross's Accelerando stories.) The latter three novels have all been mass market originals - perhaps their failure to appear between hard covers has told against them. If so, that's a shame - I urge readers to seek out these first rate novels.
 Sad, elegaic, almost heartbreaking end to the Queendom of Sol March 14, 2006
Peter D. Tillman (Taos, NM USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
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This is a sad book, an elegaic book, in some ways a heartbreaking book. McCarthy kicks out all the props from under his magnificent, glittering Queendom of Sol, and it falls like, well, a megaton of brickmail. Not a pretty sight. I suppose the author intends this as a cautionary tale. The series is structured as a classical tragedy: the sad consequences of human hubris.
My problem? Let me quote the perspicacious James Nicoll, over at rec.arts.sf.written: "My specific complaint is that the precise technological limitations introduced in _Lost in Transmission_ felt as though they did not arise from the logic of the technology but because the author had a particular direction he wanted to force the plot in." Ayup. In particular, the inexplicable (but, sadly, not unprecedented) error of not designing the Nescog [1] to fail safe -- since the alternative was Murdered Earth, and hundreds of billions of deaths. But, in this case, this is a severe WSOD-breaker: the designer had to face (and fix) a very similar disaster in book #1. Good engineers learn from their mistakes.
The ending? I first thought it was going to be the obligatory Hollywood happy-ever-after, but McCarthy likes to play with our expectations. So it's bittersweet and quite effective, if manipulative. There's a hook for a sequel [2], and a great (nearly) last line: "Live a little. Have some fun."
The "Queendom of Sol" future history is a remarkable literary achievement, one that will repay rereading. The series opened with 2000's universally-praised The Collapsium, a spectacular future technothriller, overplayed (imo) for laughs, but with as dazzling a set of bleeding-edge technogoodies as any hard-sf fan could imagine. The middle two volumes are understated, overlong and weren't as well-received [3]. The third, Lost in Transmission, is something of a downer. Well, so is the windup(?) fourth volume, but it does make you think. I'll be rereading it.
If you've missed the series, by all means start with vol. 1, The Collapsium. From there, you may want to consider jumping to this volume.
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[1] The New Systemwide Collapsar Grid, for rapid transit (etc.)
[2] --though the author's website does describe this as the final volume.
[3] McCarthy could have strenghened the series (imo) by judicious editing of vols 2 & 3 into a single volume.
Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman
My reviews of previous books were wrong(sort of) October 22, 2005
G. Nappi (Portland Maine)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
I can admit it. this book is just plain good. I had said that I bought the entire series after reading the Collapsium (which was great) and was disappointed through the next two books. I was not looking forward to this book, but this was as good as the first book. Excellent in fact, and I discovered the difference. In both the first and last book, which are good, the plot is characterized by man versus man (or robot) and in the other two books (the second and third) the plot is mostly man vs society (yawn) and man vs nature (yawn). Now there are elements of each in all four books but the main plots are thos I just listed. Let me tell you man vs nature/society just is not that entertaining. It was intelligent and thoughtful but not that fun. The first and last books are also intelligent (which the author has obviously) but enjoyable. Read through the second and third novels (which should be combined into one shorter book) and find the light at the end of the tunnel. The series is saved.
The mediocre immorbid's impressive resume September 4, 2005
M. A. Plus (Mayer, Arizona)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
While I like Wil McCarthy's vision of the capabilities of future technologies to reshape man's tools and environment, his view of the psychology of the radically life-extended or "immorbid" individual doesn't quite satisfy me. McCarthy seems to suffer from the anxiety of Robert Heinlein's influence, in that he portrays insenescent characters who, like Lazarus Long, live a succession of recognizably human lives, with a few medical enhancements along the way, instead of using their technologies to become something radically different from human, if only to see how it feels. Maybe I expect too much from science fiction from my long involvement in cryonics and my exploration of Transhumanist ideas, but I feel disappointed that the Queendom of Sol lacks room for truly "posthuman" entities.
On the other hand, McCarthy does convey a sense of how an ordinary person in that kind of society could over the centuries and millennia accumulate a respectable record of accomplishments just from learning and applying normal human skills. It reminds me of Leon Trotsky's fantasy in "Literature and Revolution" that under a utopian communism, where people had the freedom and the means to explore their biological potentials, the run-of-the-mill individual would display abilities comparable to Aristotle's, Goethe's and Marx's, while the superior individual would go way beyond the geniuses of the past. Maybe the ordinary guy does have that kind of potential within him, if he didn't age or get sick and he had the centuries to develop those kinds of cognitive powers from having to solve a much wider range of practical problems than he would have encountered in a "normal" human lifespan.
McCarthy does end his novel with a way for civilization to rebuild, so I look forward to more sequels where his ultramature hero Radmer can show once again what he has within him.
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