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.