Search Worlds Without End

Nemo's mother and father left him behind to enter "the Bin"—joining twelve billion uploaded personalities who live in crime-free, disease-free and deathless virtual societies.

Nemo has come of age on a dangerous, near-deserted planet populated by a handful of stragglers: religious fundamentalists and rebels, the creeps and the crazies.

Now he is twenty-one. And on a rare, reluctant visit to the parents who abandoned flesh and son for cyber-utopia, Nemo has met the perfect woman: a new Bin arrival named Justine, a beautiful pop singer who dreams other people's dreams in the virtual night.

The setting is the moon, where newfound industrial strength gives the frontier communities a chance to show independence from the Earth nations that established them. A leading constitutionalist and friend of the U.S. president, Justice Cabot Huntington is sent in to regain control. The stiff-necked judge looks forward to writing precedents for space law, but when his first decision leads to the death of Soviet miners he must reevaluate his position and acknowledge his own complicity in the deadly power struggle that comes to implicate both the Russian and American leaders in the miners' murders.

Snodgrass's idealistic portrait of the spacers is appealing if broad and rather simple, and the protests against martial law, the courtroom theatrics and the spacegoing shootouts keep the action boiling.

Judge Cabot Huntington becomes caught in the middle of a conflict between ruthless, corrupt industrial powers on Earth and a group of proud, determined colonists over newly discovered diamond mines on Mars.

Judge Cabot Huntingdon, dodging impeachment, is hiding among the Belters. The Fifteenth Circuit Court has been suspended, leaving those who live in the belt, on Mars, or on the Moon, on their own. In those territories there is no judicial system approved by Earth, and therefore no judicial buffer against Earth's assaults.

Now terrorists in the Belt have hijacked a spaceship carrying antimatter and are threatening the Earth with it.

It's clearly going to be tough for Judge Cabot to keep the Earth and the Belt from each other's necks, notwithstanding the dubious "help" of his well-connected family.