To Crush the Moon

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 Towajione of the greatest terraformers of the agesto literally crush the moon. If they succeed, they'll save billions of lost souls. If they fail, they'll strand humanity between deathand something unimaginably worse.... From the Paperback edition.

Wil McCarthy, after ten years of rocket science with Lockheed Martin, traded the hectic limelight of the space program for the peace and quiet (ha!) of commercial robotics at Omnitech, where he works as a research and development hack.

He writes a monthly column for the SciFi Channel's news magazine (www.scifi.com/sfw), and his less truthful writings have appeared in Aboriginal SF, Analog, Interzone, Asimov's Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, and various anthologies. His novel, Bloom, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Further biographical and bibliographic information at: www.sff.net/people/wmccarth