The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 17 July 2024
by John Sandford and Ctein
It's 2066, and the human race has moved along at its usual pace. Not a lot has changed, culturally, from the present day, except that the the technology and culture of space travel has moved right along. The Americans have a thriving space tourism business, and the Chinese are on the brink of sending humans off to colonize Mars. Into this moment, an artificial object from beyond the solar system has arrived at the planet Saturn. At first, only the American astronomers have spotted it. Soon enough, the world is in on the secret. Something from Somewhere has visited Saturn, and a little while later, has left again. It leaves behind the assumption that these visitors came to Saturn for a reason and that one of the icy moonlets of this massive outer planet might be something more than a big ball of ice.
Soon enough, the secret is out and there is a new space race between the Chinese and the Americans, to refit their spaceships for a journey post-haste, to the rings of Saturn. The book is heavily populated, but there are characters we follow pretty closely most of the way. One of these is Sandy Darlington (any relation to the relatively obscure 1960s folk singer of the same name?), a young extraordinarily rich and handsome California surfer who seems to be at the right place at all the right times, and who has a dark history in black ops (or, perhaps, Sandy is the author's own doppelganger). There is an extraordinarily pretty news correspondent, some extremely competent astronauts and engineers, and an idiosyncratic anthropologist who brings his cat on the trip.
These are busy people, and within a year or two an orbiting space station has been refitted for a fast trip to Saturn by way of a quick flyby of the Sun (the astrodynamics here have been meticulously calculated by the authors, but this one point seems flawed to this rocket-scientist reader). The vast majority of the book is full of the complicated logistics and engineering of the American ship to Saturn, re-christened the Richard M. Nixon in cynical recognition of that president's cooperation with China in the 1970s. This is what they call hard science-fiction, in which the authors endeavor to make the science part of the fiction as authentic, plausible and logical as possible. It is entertaining enough, but we really want to get to Saturn, don't we? Despite leaving later, the Nixon manages to catch up with the Chinese ship and gets to Saturn a week or so earlier than the rivals.
Now, here, this reader would have much preferred to spend time with the anthropologist, his cat, and some of the scientists on this 91-member crew. But Sandford, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper feature writing, is much more an author of (many) political thrillers than science-fiction novels. The encounter with the extraterrestrial civilization is inventive and clever, but brief and entirely devoid of the significance of such a humanity-changing event. We get to hear answers to the crews' questions, but there are a ton of un-asked questions left to the reader to imagine. What is really going on here is a race between China and the USA to acquire as much advanced technical hardware or knowhow from the aliens as they can and get back to Earth so they can clobber their rivals in the never-ending geopolitical battle of East vs. West. The who and the why questions of the aliens are answered on a surface level. We're here to grab the stuff and go.
The adventure of the return journey goes from the fatally damaged Chinese ship, to a case of interplanetary piracy and the brink of war started over some bits of alien hardware. And who wins the pool over when and where our protagonists will finally fall (slowly at 0.1g) into bed together? So, this turns out to be sci-fi for readers of political thrillers and/or techno-gearheads. It is pretty straightforward, a romp across the solar system. A light journey to the icy rings of Saturn. The book's authors are clearly enjoying themselves as they tell this story, which starts a lot like Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and borrows some of its mysteries and adventures in space-flight.
(Sandford is a pseudonym for John Camp, who won a 1986 Pulitzer-Prize for feature writing, and Ctein is the unusual name of a skilled photographer and writer.)