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....
...the Author has created a story worthy of Tolkien and Niven... -- Ernest Lilley, SFRevu
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. -- Paul Witcover, Scifi.com
This is a human and engaging story, hung on plausible but boggling technologies. -- Jim Hopper, The San Diego Union-Tribune