Very good SF about World where Earth has discovered that one of 7 moons is actually a powerful weapon that it decides to try to get back thru a travel tunnel. Complications arise as to its value to the home ?World? and other artifacts present on the planet.

A team of human scientists arrive on a planet ostensibly to study the society of its pre-industrial people who have an interesting concept of "shared reality" that keeps them pretty peaceful... or controlled? Also, one of their "moons" is actually a remnant of the same technology as the star gates that humanity is using for their interplanetary travel. This orb may be important because humanity is engaged in a genocidal war with another species, and they're currently losing.
The team must manage both the primary objective of scientific and anthropological study (along with the common non-interference principle) while also investigating the nature of the orb and maybe whether it's causing this "shared reality" thing?

It's been about a year and a half since I read this book (I'm really behind on my book reviews, sigh) and I didn't remember much about this one after reading the description. I opened it back up and a lot more came back to me. While the story was entertaining, and I seem to remember I sped through the trilogy in a week, I'm not finding much memorable about it. ( )

A strong cultural-conflict type science fiction novel. The military characters are somewhat one-dimensional, but most of the book is dedicated to the more interesting interactions between the research team, which Kress invests with a fun mix of personalities, and the aliens, who are endowed with a novel and thought-provoking biological adaptation. Will definitely plan to read on in this series. ( )

Some intriguing stuff in here, but a lot of genre trash to wade through to get to it.

Probability Moon, by Nancy Kress, is the first book in a trilogy about the planet World, its people and the strange, alien artifact that appears to influence all of reality around it. A team of Terran scientists travel to this planet to interact with the natives, unaware that the mission is actually a military one that involves one of the "moons" of the planet, which turns out to be an alien artifact of immense age and power. While the scientists are attempting to understand the natives' sense of "shared reality" - there is no dissent among the people because dissent causes literal, physical "headpain" - they also stumble upon a buried artifact that may or may not be correlated with the "moon." But when they are seen to violate shared reality, they become "unreal" to the people of World and the matter of simple survival becomes most urgent.... I have always loved Nancy Kress's books; she's one of the few female hard-science sf/f writers working today and she manages to combine well-drawn characters with whom we empathize with clear and succinct discussions of the hard sciences, in this case physics and quantum physics. I'm not saying that I understood all the scientific underpinnings of the story, but I could at least grasp the general picture, and the momentum of the plot and the personalities of the characters carried me through the bits I didn't get. Recommended - I've already started on Book 2! ( )