Dark as Day

January 14, 2002
Fans of tangled plots, detailed settings and taut adventure will have a great time with Nebula Award–winner Sheffield's follow-up to Cold as Ice
(1992). Earth and settlements on our moon and on Mars languish following the Great War, while colonies in the Asteroid Belt and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are now thriving centers for business and research. Alex Ligon, heir to Ligon Industries, has turned his back on the family business to pursue mathematical modeling of development in the solar system. As Alex frets over his latest model, which shows humanity mysteriously dying out within a century, his family manipulates him into visiting Bat, a brilliant but antisocial hacker who owns the lease on Saturn's moon Pandora, where the Ligons want to place a new processing facility. Eager to acquire a cosmically devastating weapon left over from the Great War of which he's heard rumor, Bat agrees to meet with Alex out of curiosity over the mathematician's population model and a possible connection between it and the weapon. In the meantime, a man who may be the key to Bat's hypothetical superweapon is on his way to Ganymede, and SETI investigator Milly Wu has discovered the first real signal from an alien intelligence. Sheffield ties all the threads together a little too neatly by the end, but there's plenty of yarn left over for another sequel. The world he creates here seems imminently possible, and his characters, especially Milly and Bat, are portrayed with humor as well as the intellectual rigor demanded by a hard SF plot.

March 15, 2002
Decades after the Great War almost destroyed humanity, the human race has recovered somewhat and has settled and prospered in the southern half of Earth, on Mars, and on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. As scientist Alex Ligon stumbles upon a mathematical model that predicts the end of the human race, neophyte scientist Milly Wu discovers signals from outside the solar system, and reclusive genius Rustum Battachariya finds a powerful weapon left over from the Great War. Sheffield's sequel to Cold as Ice brings the future of space colonization to life in a visionary tale of aliens and artifacts that combines sf adventure, wry humor, and spot-on science. For most sf collections.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2002
The sequel to " Cold as Ice "(1992) operates at the same high level of quality, though with 10 years' worth of other strong books to Sheffield's credit, that won't much surprise his steady readers. It opens with the solar system a little farther along in recovering from the Great War, and it interweaves three subplots involving three different characters. Alex Ligon, heir to a multiplanetary fortune, develops a population-expansion model that suggests the human race is doomed. Milly Wu, newly arrived at the SETI project base, believes she has detected the signals of intelligent aliens. And eccentric and reclusive mathematician Rustum Battachariya, who collects Great War hardware the way some people nowadays collect World War II relics, stumbles on something rather more dangerous: a weapon that can destroy the sun. Following these three characters, Sheffield leads us through the book with his usual wit, impeccable science, and command of the language. It is hard to think of anybody who is writing hard sf these days substantially better than he is.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)