Well, China has colonised the Moon and the rest of the world is playing catch-up, making the dusty, cratered lump of rock a giant political football. Shenanigans start up there, involving internal Chinese politics, but things turn international when a murder is committed and blamed on an American...an odd series of chases and attempts to hide follow, as "global" revolution looms.

"Global" in quotation marks, becuase KSR argues that only the USA and China matter any more and that they have become economically co-dependent. I personally think one Vladimir Putin would dispute the first part of that analysis. It smacks of the over-simplification prevalent in the Cold War era USA that Europe was nothing but a potential battle field to be fought over by the binary Superpowers.

It was amusing to find charcters from KSR's novel, Antarctica, playing key roles, thus linking this book to that but also, by extention, to the Science in the Capital sequence. Additionally, strong reference is made to events in the USA that are the material of the novel, New York, 2140 - but that's ~100 years in the future of this book, so he's just recycling those ideas.

I struggled to connect with the protagonists here and felt distanced by a fair amount of apparent Luggage Syndrome, which was disappointing. Neither the best nor the worst by Robinson.