The Children of Haarlani

See the professional review in Odyssey: the e-journal of the British Interplanetary Society; Jan 2015; www. bis-space.com BOOK SUMMARY Karla Wu Li took the blame for the disaster which was only fair. How many nuclear spaceship designers get to start an atomic war? How many engineers achieve the banning of nuclear power in space for over fifty years? But as we will see Karla makes amends from beyond the grave. By 2085 AI androids go where humans cannot to explore the moons of Jupiter. The lifeforms they find there in Europa's sub-ice ocean are returned to Earth where biologists discover ancient message codes in the Europan DNA hinting at a partial Martian origin for complex life on Earth and Europa. A crew of humans and the android Odysseus, return to Mars and find the last Martian Archives. Odysseus' psychotic brother, convinced that Mars is the home of Satan, follows and attempts to destroy the surface of the planet by diverting a small asteroid. He manages only to raise the Martian 'ghosts' and awaken the planet's plate tectonics. The scene is set for a new struggle between good and evil for the possession of two worlds and the souls of four sentient species. This story is an epic of exploration in the tradition of Niven's 'Ringworld' and Blish's 'A Case of Conscience'.