The Moon Maze Game, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes

This novel is set about seventy years in our future, by which time we have several established colonies on the moon, regularly mine the asteroid belt, and Hilton maintains a hotel in Earth's orbit. This era gives the authors easy humor targets, such as the tale of a battle during the Second Canadian War where a US base was ambushed and should have been lost, but the Canuck soldiers didn't secure the showers and were overtaken by a bunch of naked GIs. Sadly these moments are the best parts of the book; the plot was middling at best and the characters one-dimensional—which takes some doing as much of the time they are themselves playing other roles in a giant LARP. Uneven but entertaining, this is a good afternoon read but not one that is going to provoke a lot of thought.

First Sentence:

Botanica was a medium-sized crater, recently sealed to hold an atmosphere of oxygen baked from lunar rock and nitrogen imported from the Aeros asteroid.

Paris: The Novel, by Edward Rutherfurd

This is the history of Paris told through they eyes of six fictional families between 1261 and 1968. The types of families are well chosen to give a cross section of society through history: the de Cygnes are aristocrats and royalists, the Le Sourds are socialists and revolutionaries, the Gascons are craftsmen and laborers, the Renards are Protestants, the Blanchards are Catholics, and the Jacobs are Jewish. These characters are injected into and around a huge number of important events, such as the Paris Commune and the Terror, the construction of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, the Avignon Papacy, Vichy France, the Dreyfus Affair and the rocky history of Jews in France, and Catholicism versus Protestantism and the Edicts of Nantes and Fointainbleau. Each chapter is set in a different era but they don't appear in chronological order, instead bouncing from 1875 to 1462 to 1907 and so on. As the narrative follows the same families through successive generations this can be somewhat confusing at times, especially as some use the same given names over and over—for example, there are three separate Roland de Cygnes that take the stage in various eras. This drawback is minor though, and doesn't dramatically detract from what is overall a compelling and illuminating story.

First Sentence:

Paris.