Building Harlequin's Moon
Larry Niven and Breanda Cooper
Tom Doherty Associates, 2005, 400pp.

A ramship fleeing the corruption of Artificial Intelligence and Nanotechnology on Earth is crippled. To make repairs, they must build a temporary colony on a moon they construct and terraform at a handy solar system. The commanding council must struggle with the ethics of the technology they fear but must use, and with the fact that there will not be room to take the lunar colonists on toward the final destination. They must be left behind on an unstable moon.

The status of the temporary colonists is the big conflict. Are they temporary people without rights, a mere means to an end?

I found the easy acceptance of this premise the first stumbling block. The second was the initial period for the construction of the moon - 70,000 years. To believe that a culture and it's technology could stay intact over such a span, even with cryogenics and a form of eternal youth provided by the dread nanotechnology was a stretch. That the dream of rejoining two other colony ships at the final destination and expecting any continuity in culture over such a span was nearly the final straw.

Having stretched us that far, though, the authors craft an interesting story. A young girl comes of age... Ok, I'm a sucker for that plot device.

Details of the terraforming are interesting, and would leand an interested reader into exploring scientific ideas about such processes. A decent space opera.