A Grey Moon Over China

This is a very sad story, as others have said. Nevertheless, it's one of the best novels I've read. Life, as the literature professors will tell you, is a tragedy. Yet there is often joy and humor along the way and so it is here. So I was sorry to see the story end, especially the way it did, but I didn't feel tricked or surprised. At least the protagonist had one companion left, even if it was only a worry-wart robot with a Welsh accent. I always assume space colonization stories will be hopeful, but the colonists often wind up losing much of their high technology as it wears out and they are unable to replace it. They sometimes can't even go back into space, let alone travel across it again. This one is a little different. But it's also a vindication of Murphy's Law. What they hope to escape, they wind up taking with them. The technology they create to help them turns on them. But the turning is to their ultimate benefit, once they figure it out. They succeed in spite of themselves, something you may only realize after you've thought about it a bit.

In 2027 the world environment has been poisoned to the point of no return and consequently the global economy stands on the verge of total collapse as alternate fuels have either failed or been ignored while the oil supply is nearing depletion. War over oil and water has made for strange bedfellows as for instance a Pacific Rim alliance ties Japan and California together in combat with much of the remaining mainland American states. Army engineer Eduardo Torres finds the solution when he uncovers plans for a quantum battery that if shared would save the planet. Instead, he decides to keep the technology setting up his own "nation" by buying a mercury force. Following up on an abandoned plan to colonize space, Torres builds starships and enters a wormhole to the Holzstein System. However, he is not welcomed as another humanoid race and aliens attack his fleet. This grim look at the near future paints a bleak horizon as the earth is consumed by the liquid wars. The cast is powerful and realistic as Darwinism wins over creationism with survival of the most diabolical. Torres and other key characters are not likable, but that is one of the key points of this gloomy cautionary tale in which Thomas A. Day lucidly insures his players are not romantic heroes. With a wild well written military in space clash of cultures that enhance the argument how sentient are we as a species if we commit increasingly faster pandemic suicide. GREY MOON OVER CHINA is a super science fiction thriller warning us that time is running out on mankind. Harriet Klausner

I'm acquisitions editor for a small press. I was out of town when Day's manuscript arrived. When I got back to town, I took it out with me when I went to breakfast. I went from the cafe to a coffee shop to a bar, reading for almost ten hours straight, because I did not want to do anything that'd interrupt. Now, don't get me wrong: "Grey Moon" isn't happy. There's nothing sunny about it. If you've stayed with "Battlestar: Galactica" for the past few years, run back through your mind & take out all the happy parts. Okay, now you've got some idea. It's very dark (though without the excesses of the various "-punk" labels people are trying to apply to it), more a sort of political thriller than space-war science fiction. Watching the character's transformation throughout the book is amazing not from hitting you in the face with it, but because Day is adept at a "slow burn" sort of revelation, where he hands you all the parts, a few here & there, until you suddenly realize it's all obvious. If I'd acted a few days sooner, I'd have bought this manuscript. That bums me out... but I'm sincerely glad that Day's small-press sale has gone on to TOR. I wish him nothing but luck, & hope to have more opportunity to say "I knew him when..." in future.

I would argue that this book is not just Sci-Fi, but literature, in the classic sense. It tells a hard story in a heart-breaking way. A flawed hero's journey, away from, and back to, the broken self. It also looks at the fallout of what appears to be the pursuit of a dream, but is really just a flight from one's origins. It is not an easy read as Day just dumps you in the middle of a new world and does not explain much of the technology. Neither is it filled with joy. Killing, adults, children, and animals, in pursuit of a military goal, are all fair game here, as it is in real life. If you like the grim re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica, you will be on solid ground here. Hope does inhabit this book, but only of the ragged sort where a weed springs up between two desolate rocks.

Winner of the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction, A Grey Moon Over China is a dark, apocalyptic tale of a future riven by human greed. In a world-spanning energy war that pits the United States on one side against Japan and California on the other, a disillusioned company of Army engineers steal the plans for an energy device that could end the war and instead extort the resurrection of an abandoned space colonization effort to take them away from the dying planet. But they cannot leave all their evils behind as easily as that; armed colonists pursue them, and the wars follow them to the crushing Black Planet where armies are trained, to impoverished farms , and do the heavily guarded portal leading to a nigh-legendary haven. Following its cast of deeply flawed protagonists - the man driven to escape his past by destroying everything connected to it, the woman whose love is so all-consuming it will surely lead to self-destruction, soulless and merciless warriors male and female, and a failed priest who must ultimately resurrect the last shred of his conscience, A Grey Moon Over China is a compelling chronicle of the dark complexities of human character as surely as it is a star-spanning adventure.