he conclusion of the Queendom of Sol quartet takes up right where its predecessor left off. It's not necessary to read Lost in Transmission—or, for that matter, the first two novels in the series, The Collapsium and The Wellstone—to enjoy To Crush the Moon, but why deprive yourself of the pleasure? Wil McCarthy has consistently topped himself in each installment of this idiosyncratic joyride of a space opera, and the present volume is no exception.
Crush deftly tells two parallel stories that ultimately converge. The first takes place 2,010 years after the collapse of the Queendom of Sol and features its once—and perhaps future—king, the genius inventor Bruno de Towaji, along with Conrad Mursk, the jack-of-all-trades who, in previous volumes, was the right-hand man of Bruno's exiled son, Bascal, ruler of the colony at Barnard's Star whose grim fate was the subject of Lost in Transmission. In this storyline, set on the worldlet of Lune, which is what's left of the moon after it's "crushed" in a spectacular feat of engineering designed to provide sufficient gravity to retain an atmosphere, Bruno and Conrad embark on a desperate quest to a mythical city buried at the center of a "Great Red Spot"-like storm. There they hope to find Queendom-era artifacts, including working fax machines and devices capable of transforming matter into, well, anything at all, which, hooked into the vast telecommunications system called Nescog, were used in the Queendom's heyday as (among other things) faster-than-light transportation devices. Lune, apparently the sole remaining outpost of humanity in a Sol system whose inner planets are now referred to by the ominous names of "Murdered Earth," "Murdered Venus" and "Murdered Mars," is under attack by the robot servants of a mysterious personage known as the Glimmer King, and without access to advanced technology the beleaguered humans don't stand a chance.
The second storyline takes place thousands of years earlier, when the starship Newhope, upon which Bascal and his fellow exiles had been dispatched to Barnard's Star, unexpectedly returns to the Queendom. The ship has been badly damaged en route, and its crew, including Conrad Mursk, is in stasis. Its cargo consists of 25,000 frozen people ... and the stored brain scan of King Bascal, from which a close facsimile, if not the man himself, can be produced.
The Queendom can bring most of the corpsicles back to life, but should it? Already the introduction of "immorbidity" technology—by which recipients are rendered immune to disease and cellular degradation, rendering them potentially immortal—has strained the Queendom's resources and its social compact. Simply put, there is no longer enough room for everyone, and the eradication of death as a natural event has given birth to terrorists known as Deathists, fanatics who do not merely seek death for themselves but wish to impose it upon others whether they like it or not.
It turns out that Newhope is only the first ship to return from a catastrophically failed colony. Soon, so many desperate colonists are clamoring for re-admission that the Queendom's economic foundations are threatened. Small artificial "planettes" are constructed to house the refugees—including the "crushed moon" project headed by Conrad Mursk—but even so, resettlement is a slow process, and a backlog of starships with cargos of millions begins to pile up in the Kuiper belt. Deathists make contact with the crews of these ships and find new believers and allies among them. The result, which comes as a real shock even though it's all but inevitable, leads to the dire situation that Bruno and Conrad are trying to ameliorate some 2,010 years later.
A dream come true—literally
In his prefatory acknowledgments, McCarthy reveals that the title of this novel came to him 20 years ago in a dream. It's typical of this author's whimsical sense of humor and wildly inventive mind that he should not only make that dream come true in the most literal sense but invent a reason for crushing the moon that is central to his plot and scientifically plausible, even elegant, to boot. McCarthy does sensawunda science fiction with the best of them, but what he provides that Baxter, Wilson and his other peers do not is a wink and a nudge and a chuckle at the very outlandishness of his literary and scientific speculations. In this, he is closer to Jack Vance and Michael Moorcock.
Like the best work of those two masters, McCarthy's novels, for all their exuberant excess, are emotionally satisfying. To Crush the Moon and its predecessors are grounded in characters who may not be, strictly speaking, human any longer, but whose struggle to come to grips with what they have lost and gained is one that human readers can follow with sympathy, amusement and horror, sometimes all at once. It's this that makes the Queendom of Sol quartet more than just a rollicking good read.
McCarthy has set up the technological and sociological implications of his godlike future so well that Crush unfolds with a tragic sense of inevitability that is not at all ameliorated by the very real delights and surprises of the narrative. Because of the framing device that sets half of the novel amid the ruins of a civilization about as close to a utopia as it's possible to get, a mood of loss, of regret, comes to permeate the action, so that even at its most energetic and suspenseful, an elegiac undercurrent haunts its pages.
McCarthy's focus this time is split between Bruno and Conrad, weary immortals whose conscience drives them to atone for past mistakes that were the fruits of their own hubris. Bruno is a Promethean figure, so blinded by science that he would steal its fire even at the cost of burning the world to cinders. Conrad was perhaps more human than Bruno to start with and thus retains more humanity. Both men have their own reasons for opposing the Glimmer King, whose identity cannot be counted among the novel's successful surprises, and those reasons, as well as the long history behind them, gather loose strands from previous volumes into a poignant summation that, despite the presence of what some readers—not this reviewer—may regard as a deus ex machina, is worthy of all that has gone before. Although the quartet is triumphantly concluded, one can only hope that McCarthy is not finished with this compelling future.
