Moving Mars

Casseia Majumdar is a student at the University of Mars, Sinai, when she joins a protest and gets herself thrown out along with several thousand others. Mars is governed by Binding Multiples, family corporations that agree to cooperate and mostly do not, and the students demonstrate against the Statist party, the faction that wants Mars under one central government. Earth, which is far richer and controls the trade the colony depends on, would also like Mars unified, for its own reasons.

Casseia goes into politics because the alternative is watching. She travels to Earth as a junior diplomat and learns exactly how a small dependent economy is handled by a large one, becomes vice president of an interim government, and spends decades negotiating with people who have no intention of negotiating.

Running beside this is Charles Franklin, a physicist she loved and left, whose team has found a way to alter the descriptors of matter itself using quantum logic thinkers, which permits the instantaneous relocation of anything, including a planet.

When Earth plants software in Martian systems and moves to occupy, Casseia has to authorise the only defence available, and Bear commits to the consequences of his title completely.

Around four hundred and fifty pages, political for most of its length and then abruptly enormous, narrated in retrospect by a woman accounting for a decision.

Casseia is a genuinely unusual protagonist for the period: a woman who is neither a scientist nor a soldier, who is good at meetings, and whose greatest professional skill is knowing when a room has already decided.

It stands alone. Best for readers who want a novel about colonial independence with the physics kept honest right up to the point where it deliberately stops being honest, and a title that turns out to be a plan.