Broke, unemployed and desperate to avoid the breakup of his marriage, he cashes in an old travel voucher for a free trip to Nectaris, a frivolous and fun-loving resort on the moon. Not even the bubbly ambiance of the moon's various casinos and four-star restaurants can shelter Gerry from his chronic bad luck: It is during his vacation that long-running negotiations between humankind and an alien species known as the Tarsalan fall apart.

The aliens then seed Earth's atmosphere with a floating green murk, a "phytosphere," as media-savvy Neil dubs it. The phytosphere keeps sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface, sealing the world in endless night and causing crops and forests to wither on the ground. With no way of contacting his family, Gerry is left to fear the worst as reports of looting and lawlessness trickle up to Nectaris. Ironically, he is also suddenly getting some respect: The moon names him head of a scientific team tasked with studying—and ideally destroying—the cloud.

But even this glimmer of good fortune cannot last. Down on the surface, big brother Neil is leading the U.S. government's effort to vaporize the light-blocking phytosphere, and the last thing Neil wants is his loser of a brother mucking up his efforts.

As America starves, anarchy takes hold

At the core of Scott Mackay's new hard-SF novel, Phytosphere, lies a fundamental difference between Gerry's measured approach to science and Neil's tendency to go in swinging with a very expensive hammer. From the start, Gerry seeks true understanding of the Tarsalan device; Neil, meanwhile, just wants to blast the thing by whatever means he can devise most quickly. Gerry, accustomed to working with limited or no resources, has a gift for mining a lot of data out of dubiously batched-together hardware. His brother, on the other hand, has always had the shiniest toys and the unquestioned backing of the president. The tortoise-and-hare parable, with its implications in the age of global warming, is clear.

The problem with tortoises, of course, is that they lack dramatic intensity. Mackay has taken considerable trouble to create an interesting and sympathetic protagonist, but Gerry cannot hold his own against the events unfolding Earthside—his wife's fight against rapacious looters, for example, and the threat of Tarsalan invasion. His investigation of the phytosphere is a realistically quiet business, characterized by long stretches of quiet thought, the occasional nugget of new information and frequent attempts to keep the moon's administration from firing him. Even Gerry's 11th-hour transformation into a man of action fails to sufficiently liven things up—it lacks punch, and the reader never truly believes him to be in danger.

Set against this stately outer-space backdrop is the chaos unfolding in the United States as food shortages and the simple lack of daylight drive people to desperation, even insanity. Within these storylines, there is suspense aplenty: Neil crumbles at his first real experience of failure, while Gerry's wife, Glenda, fights an uphill battle to keep her kids alive and safe in a world where neighbors have begun shooting each other over cans of food. The best part of Phytosphere plays out on terra firma with Glenda and her children—in other words, in those moments when Gerry and the moon are out of sight and all but out of mind.