ven after all the trials and tribulations he endured in Jumping Off the Planet and Bouncing Off the Moon, Charles "Chigger" Dingillian is still just 13 years old. Very little time has actually passed since Chigger's father turned a supposed vacation to the moon into an attempt to escape an incipient planetary meltdown, but during that time the Dingillians have become the most wanted fugitives on or off Earth. Chigger is the sole controller of a revolutionary, possibly even sentient, artificial intelligence that his father smuggled to the moon. With Earth falling into ruin and all the off-planet colonies left on their own, ownership of the hyper-powerful AI literally means the difference between life and death for a great many groups, governments and individuals. Enough of them have already hurt, threatened, frightened or manipulated Chigger that he no longer trusts anyone outside his immediate family.
As the third book of "the Dingilliad" begins, the Dingillians are debating their options: Returning to the disintegrating Earth is both unfeasible and impossibly dangerous, and the moon doesn't seem much better, given the number of untrustworthy, feuding factions vying for control of Chigger's ward. So the whole family—Chigger, his brothers Douglas and Bobby, their parents (whom they legally divorced, but have come to terms with), Douglas' lover Mickey and their mother's friend Bev—sits down to decide what hardscrabble colony world they should join for the rest of their lives.
The decision is hard, but following through on it is even harder. A lunar revolutionary group is determined to capture the AI and its controller—or destroy them both, if there's no other way to keep everyone else from getting them. The lunar government is prepared to charge Chigger with everything from data-rape to sedition to keep him from leaving. A fundamentalist group on the outbound colony ship has convinced its members that the AI is an instrument of Satan, since it claims to be sentient but isn't human. And to top it all off, Chigger—who's still an adolescent trying to puzzle out his own personal identity—isn't entirely sure that the AI is sane.
A perfectly balanced book
Goldilocks would feel at home with this trilogy: Jumping Off the Planet packed in too much in too short a space, while Bouncing Off the Moon felt padded by comparison. But Leaping to the Stars is just right. It still has the undiluted blocks of exposition that plagued its predecessors, but this time they're shorter and tighter, and flow better with the text. It still veers off into Socratic arguments, from the nature of identity to the proper system of government, but it keeps those arguments similarly short, tight, informative and relevant to the progression of the story. It provides a series of fast-paced adventure sequences, but doesn't let the action run away with the book. It moves back to the focused, well-textured first-person point of view that made Jumping Off the Planet so immediately interesting, without forgetting that there are characters other than Chigger to be dealt with, and that they have feelings and agendas, too.
In short, it's simply a well-executed, well-balanced book. Leaping to the Stars finds a decent middle ground among exciting storytelling, technological exploration, sociopolitical and psychological musings and a modicum of teaching and preaching. It continues to have a bit of the artificial flavor of a would-be My First Primer on Independent Thought, and it's written in an airy, quick-moving style that more serious science-fiction fans may find a bit too lightweight. Many readers will have little problem skimming through it in a day or two. But the style and length both make the book very accessible to younger readers. And they're likely to be the audiences most challenged by Gerrold's radical (and very timely) ideas that America is not automatically guaranteed eternal world dominance, that the social contracts that make civilization possible are all two-way streets and that government is necessary, up to a point.
From the start, the Dingilliad trilogy has been widely compared to Robert Heinlein's juvenile novels, and Leaping to the Stars finally and fully fulfills that comparison. By combining a civics lesson, a tech manual and a classic coming-of-age tale, Gerrold has produced something that can't quite be called new, but certainly can be called masterful and satisfying.
