Mr. Day has an extraordinary background; according to his bioblurb he’s been a night cargo pilot, a senior manager in aerospace industry, and a software developer for artificial intelligence. It takes at least three of his main characters to represent the range of his experiences. His writing style is a bit like Heinlein at his darkest (think Farnham’s Freehold without the weird Freudian stuff); while his recourse to depth psychology is reminiscent of Ursula LeGuin. Not a bad combination.

The protagonist is Eduardo Torres, who in 2027 is an 18-year-old warrant officer, conscripted at age 14 by what’s left of the United States and trained in the Technical Warfare School for dirty ops. China is the dominant world power. Earth is a place of desertification, drought, famine, wars, and floods, and a population of 7 billion. During a sweep and seize mission on an island in the Pacific, Torres finds and steals an invention, a battery that can run for decades and power vehicles, planes, hospitals, computer systems - or starships. Torres wants out, bad. Trouble is, while a torus has been built in the vicinity of Venus that could theoretically propel a spaceship across light-years in hours, the project was left unfinished, owing to lack of just about every essential resource. So there’s no exit torus, and no destination.

Torres shares his find first with fellow Tech cadre, and then, carefully, with world powers in exchange for materials to build exploration drones, an exit torus, and other equipment. Mutual betrayal is the name of the game. The body count is in the tens of thousands before Torres’ team and an uneasy consortium of colonists blast off for the Holtzein system. One of the few people Torres truly respects, Patel Madhu, tries to warn him that they will be taking with them the very horrors Torres hopes to escape. The last transmission they hear from Earth is by the BBC, informing them of the total destruction of the Amazon basin by fire and the projected collapse of a self-sustaining atmosphere. The announcer goes on to say, “We look upon the departing Enterprise spacecraft and the regional fleets in their wake, … and understand that they may carry with them not only humankind’s great dream of adventure, but our very seed as well. It is for that reason alone, and for none other, that I now wish them Godspeed.”

This one has the potential for broad base appeal. There’s lots of technology and speculative science, including self-modifying intelligent machines that were not programmed with Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, plenty of military action, rival planetary colonies, suspense, sabotage, well-plotted character conflicts and evolutions, and hope that transcends despair.

In the back of my mind, I kept contrasting this book with its antipodal opposite number, Escape Velocity by Christopher Stasheff. In both stories, a splinter group colonizes a distant system in defiance of global resistance. But whereas Stasheff’s colonists are cheerful SCA members and fen, Day’s characters are borderline psychopaths or desperate people with PTSD. And yet, some of these complex survivors find, or make, a better world than the one they escape, with the help, not of a deus ex machina, but machinae ex deus. When you’re ready to put aside childish things, pick up A Grey Moon Over China. ~~ Chris Paige