And to co-pilot the Anansi, there's Marion Guiness, who's one of Janet's extra-marital former lovers. Taking care of the Gabriel is her husband Thomas, from whom she's about to separate. The Anansi will be piloted by Janet De Camp. The other can be found in the make-up of the Falling Angel crew, who are the best choices for the jobs at hand in every way except how they connect with each other. They choose to gamble on an outrageous plan that only begins with hiring a bunch of Muslim terrorists and giving them a Prometheus missile that's able to down a space shuttle in Earth orbit. One is that a group of ambitious young senior execs at Brazil Techimetal and Electromotores aren't taking their loss in the bid for the cable lying down. It's no understatement to suggest that it's going to be an explosive mission but for two completely different reasons. It's the ship given the honour of delivering the cable to Oyama in Japan, wound up into a large reel and secured within a re-entry pod that's attached to both the Anansi and the Gabriel, an ion drive tug responsible for getting the shuttle to Earth orbit where it can take over the mission. The Anansi of the title is Falling Angel's newest shuttle, though it's not a new shuttle, having seen years of service for NASA. And so, with everything apparently squared away within three chapters, we're ready for delivery to be made and here's where the novel really kicks in. No wonder there's a bidding war and the Japanese beat out the Brazilians to purchase it, Oyama Industries seeing it as being critical to their survival. It's only an eighth of a millimeter thick but fourteen hundred kilometers long and it's ten to twenty times stronger than Kevlar. Here, Falling Angel is just the means to set up the MacGuffin, which is a cable that genius metallurgist Dexter Stonecypher has extruded up there in zero gravity. Their solution is to vote for independence and see how that plays out.Įntirely by coincidence, my Hugo-Award winner for this month is 'The Moon is a Harsh Mistress', which is a heck of a lot closer to that summary than this is. However, many of the people at Falling Angel don't feel confident that the US is going to continue to support them and they're fearful that funding will end and the project with it.

They're a research station in lunar orbit that was bankrolled by the US government and built out of the shells of space shuttles. What it isn't about is Falling Angel Enterprises.

The worst thing about the novel is easily the back cover blurb on the paperback, clearly the work of a copywriter who hadn't read the book and misunderstood what it was about. A year after 'Dream Park', Steven Barnes teamed up with Larry Niven again to publish a second, unrelated novel, 'The Descent of Anansi', which is a great deal shorter, but so full of action that I finished it in one night, even if it kept me up until six in the morning.

The Descent of Anansi by Larry Niven