Saturn, by Ben Bova
Big slow SF novel about an expedition to Saturn
(Review posted 19 Jun 2005 18:34:56)

Way too long, way too slow-moving. Ten thousand people head out for Saturn in a big spinning cylinder. Two intertwined plots involve roughly seven of those ten thousand who care about the politics of the expedition and want power of one kind or another, and another roughly seven who interact directly or indirectly with the political seven and have personal stories of their own. The other 9,986 people involved apparently have no will of their own whatsoever, and behave en masse however the plot requires at any given point. For four hundred and seventy pages.

There is some interesting science and history in the background, but it's mostly very thin and has unconvincingly little impact on daily life. The Earth has gone through dramatic ecological disasters having to do with global warming and so on, and most of the world is ruled by (transparently evil) religious power groups (the Protestant New Morality in the U.S., the Catholic (but no longer anti-abortion) Holy Disciples in Europe, the (mentioned in passing) Sword of Islam elsewhere, and so on). These religious groups mostly provide a thin pretext for the expedition having been launched in the first place, and various of the evil political types having been put aboard.

There's nanotech, but the religious groups think that it's evil so it's banned on Earth. (It's apparently used outside of Earth, in the independant Moon colony and in the asteroid belt, but we see nothing of the consequences of that, which would presumably be enormous.) Life has been found in the atmosphere of Saturn, and on Titan, but humanity doesn't seem especially interested in the fact. There's cyrogenic preservation of people with incurable diseases, and there are RNA treatments that can give anyone a perfect memory (but only one character has had them, and it plays no significant part in the plot). The people are on the way to Saturn, but pretty much everything about the story could have been ported to, say, an isolated town in the Sierras with only minor structural changes.

So the bad guys are pretty much cardboard cutouts trying to take power. (I was unconvinced that taking power over ten thousand people would really be such a strong motivator. One guy commits murder to hasten his becoming the head of a department, and we're apparently supposed to regard this as more or less ordinary evil rather than raving lunacy.) And the good guys are doing various things, including a bold stunt out among the Rings that runs into a certain amount of trouble. And people are falling in love. And just when it looks like the bad guys might kill some of the good guys, and some other good guys might be in serious trouble out there in space, there's a couple of wild coincidences and everything's okay. The bad guys are defeated and the right pairs of good guys are together. And the only at all wild and interesting SFish thing that happens in the book has happened only in the last thirty-five pages, and if it's going to be developed or explored at all it'll have to be in the sequel.

(And one minor nit that I just have to mention: more than once a character remarks on how, although they are "really" walking uphill, it "feels like" they are going downhill, because the spin-induced gravity is getting weaker as they approach the axis. First, there's no such thing as "really uphill" in this situation. And second, I'm not at all convinced that walking into a region of lower gravity would feel like walking downhill; certainly when I walk downhill here on Earth, gravity isn't decreasing as I go. I really don't know what Bova is thinking here.)

All told, not a particularly good use of time.