Saturn

Rating:
Summary: A complete let down
Review: I used to love Bova's work but this one was a complete disappointment. The science was missing, characters you care about were missing, and an engaging plot was missing. And his hatred of religion is really bothersom. His continuing bashing of religion just shows his ignorence. This is most likely the last Bove book I will read.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting Premise, But Not Bova's Best Work
Review: I'll certainly commend Ben Bova for his fascinating exploration of the space habitat Goddard as it traverses interplanetary space from the Moon (Selene) to distant Saturn. His prose is most memorable when he describes the layout of the colony and its ten thousand inhabitants. Unfortunately less memorable are his characters, which are not as well drawn as those in his earlier work, most notably "The Kinsman Saga". Yet fans of hardcore hi-tech science fiction may not be disappointed with this work, enjoying its vivid descriptions of the colony and its journey across the Solar System, especially its trek into Saturn's vast network of rings and minor satellites.

Rating:
Summary: A weak novel in an otherwise stellar career
Review: Keep in mind I've read every book of the "Grand Tour." I have plenty of Bova's books in mind to compare this to, and I'm not really sure why he wrote this one or how it was even published. One word sums it up: BORING. You don't really care about a single character or what will happen. What is the point? Nothing hangs in the balance. There is no exploration or science. Thinking back to his masterpiece MARS, it's hard to believe these two books were written by the same person.

Furthermore, I don't think Mr. Bova edited this book! There are many errors ... one paragraph used the word "Path" about ten times ... and there is one place in the paperback where half a sentence of dialogue is missing! The dialogue just suddenly begins in the middle of a word, and the beginning quote is missing along with who knows how many words.

I will always buy Bova's books and read them with glee. But one wonders what was going on when he wrote Saturn. I understand he's writing a sequel called TITAN. I have to wonder, why?

Rating:
Summary: Bova atypically blows it
Review: Maybe it's just me, but I was so disappointed in Saturn that I wonder if Bova even wrote it. He's done so much good stuff in the past that I bought this book with hardly a look. I knew it would be good because Bova so rarely disappoints. Unfortunately, this one is bad on so many levels you hardly know where to start.

Let's start with the habitat Goddard where all the action takes place. It's not nearly as well described as in Bova's earlier work, Colony. He tells us nearly nothing about how it actually works, but of that little he gets lots of it wrong. The habitat has "solar windows" to "let in the sunshine" that will let the inhabitants grow their crops. Hellooooo, we're out at Saturn: the sunlight is only about one percent as bright as Earth. Those plants can't possibly grow on one percent of their normal sunlight. Even though it's never a real plot point, the habitat is described as having one pretty awful sounding cafeteria and two rather small restaurants - for 10,000 people! Have you ever seen or heard of a cafeteria designed to serve and seat 10,000 people at once? Why put all of your eggs in one basket anyway? Wouldn't those two restaurants be reserved into the next century? And he never explains how there can be an economy in the habitat. The restaurants have to get their raw materials from the farms, but they're privately financed, so you would think there would have to be some form of payment or something. There is nothing about the economy at all. Also, at times he seems to forget that the habitat is rotating.

The characters behave in ways that don't make the least bit of sense. One young woman is utterly devoted to a much older (and very evil) man. She never questions his questionable actions for a minute and no real rationale is given for her infatuation. Other characters are just woodenly evil. If someone gets in their way, why -shrug- they'll just have them killed. Torture? -shrug- One character goes missing for a week and there's no hue and cry from her friends, they just hope for the best. Because it helps the plot, all of the scientists only want to study Titan, they have literally zero interest in any of the other moons or the rings or Saturn itself. Nearly all of the characters hate and fear nanotechnology, but no good reason is given except a toss-off reference to "gray goo". The whole book is really about politics, but none of the characters act like they know anything about politics or governance and they don't have any intention of learning. They just make sage predictions, "the people will elect me, I'm sure of it" and do a lot of wrangling and back-biting.

The worst part, for me, was the terrible science. I read Bova because he always gets his science right. Not this time, though. His habitat goes straight from outbound trajectory to orbital insertion (a high-acceleration maneuver Cassini just performed a few weeks ago), yet the people inside feel nothing. How are those "solar windows" pointing at the sun during all of this? Also, this maneuver is one you go into backwards (as Cassini just did) because you're slowing down, but he has them frontwards. One character wants to mine the rings for water ice, because water is "as valuable as gold" to the lunar colony, Selene. Other characters don't want to upset the ecology of the rings. No mention is made of all the other water that is around Saturn (or Jupiter, for that matter: look at Europa). The rings would probably be harder to exploit that those nice low-escape-velocity moons (Saturn's Phoebe is all ice). At one point in the book, for no good plot reason, he has a comet drop out of the Kuiper Belt and be captured by Saturn. It just slides into a nice, tight round orbit without interacting with any other bodies - a complete impossibility of orbital dynamics.

I could go on and on, but you would get bored. There are so many fundamental mistakes that I have to wonder if Bova really wrote this. Maybe he farmed it out, like Clancy is doing? I don't know, I just know that it doesn't seem like a book he wrote.

Trust me, stay clear of this book unless you want your brains to turn into gray goo.

Rating:
Summary: Awful! Dreadful!
Review: Sorry to the fans of this author and genre, but this book is truly one of the worst I have ever read. Basically, the characters are extremely dry, weak, and/or naive beyond belief. Secondly, common with sci-fi stories, there's no spiritualality. OK, for this story, in the future, man dumps God and all religions and uses religion as a mere tool. But that always leaves a gaping hole. Something's always missing when any sort of spirituality is removed.

Just a dull, political rambling.

Rating:
Summary: a good read
Review: The list of superlatives one can use to describe a story by Ben Bova is long. I just like his writing -- always have -- he gives you part adventure, part mystery, part thriller & always good hard science fiction, in a future that is most quite probable.

In SATURN, he continues the saga started in JUPITER & THE ROCK RATS -- which is a grand tour of the solar system. You get glimpses of past characters & their lives & how their efforts have affected the efforts of those who came after them.

Rebeccasreads recommends Ben Bova as always interesting & thought-provoking.

Rating:
Summary: Incredibly Bad
Review: The novel starts with a good, if not unique premise. A large generation ship has been launched to orbit Saturn and study the planet and it's moons. Only a third of the occupants are scientists, with the rest being support staff and people to round out a society. What the residents do not know is that a major reason for the strip is a sociological study to see what kind of society develops away from the restrictive religions and societies of a rundown Earth. The novel however ruins all of this setup with incredibly weak characterizations, ridiculous plot points and absurd behavior by the main characters. For example, (Slight spoiler -After hearing that a close friend is in mortal danger, two characters go about their regular business without a thought or mention of the situation. )

There is almost no science or speculation about Saturn except for supposedly spectacular discoveries that come from nowhere and really don't ring true and are hollow revelations.

I have to say this is one of the worst books I have read, probably because the author obviously knows how to structure an interesting story very well but he just has nothing here. The characters are shallow, unbelievable and I didn't care about any of them at any point. The resolutions and fates that the characters meet are either some obscure statement about an unjust, uncaring world or the author just had no interest in having the plot make any sort of sense. For example (Spoiler ... A character plots murder, lies and manipulates, plans overthrow and torture but I guess it's possible that he might still be considered to stay on in charge once defeated in the end. Incredible)

Rating:
Summary: Avoid at all cost
Review: The planet Saturn is millions of miles from Earth and that is about as far as you will want to stay away from this utterly forgettable book.

The Sci-Fi genre, revolving around technology and fantasy, has seen its share of wooden, one-dimensional storytelling. But this novel was so bad that my first impression was that this was a book within a book, a parody of some sorts. But around page fifty, I had to face the inevitable truth: the book is for real. It contains some of the worst writing I have ever encountered.

The characters are so flat and wooden they make the early Asimov stories read like Anais Nin diaries by comparison. The bad guys are uniformly bad characters with no redeeming qualities. They are easily spotted in a crowd: look for ugly people with ugly bodies and ugly grimaces who snivel, grimace and smile coldly all the time. The good guys are equally one-dimensional. The main character is a thirty-something woman with the mind of a thirteen year old due to brain damage as a result of freezing her body decades ago. But this idea does not translate into any interesting psychology but appears to be just an excuse to write inane dialogue that serves only to expose the paper-thin plot.

Sadly, even the science part of this Science Fiction novel does not live up to its expectations. The technical details and smart extrapolations of new scientific discoveries that make sci-fi such a thrilling genre are completely absent from this book. Bova does not even attempt to go into any detail about the space ship and its inner workings. The book lacks any interesting descriptions of the technology of the time or the challenges the space colonists face and lightly skips over anything that would require serious thinking. Unlike classics like Rama or Ringworld, Saturn fails utterly to bring its space colony to life.

A badly written book, devoid of science and interesting characters. This pretentious bulk seems at first to be as big and interesting as the planet it is named after. But like the majestic planet's magical rings, it consist of almost no substance and is mainly empty upon closer inspection.



Rating:
Summary: Say It Ain't So, Ben!
Review: This book is a disappointment. I don't know if Bova is running out of good plots, he was hurried, or it was just a fluke, but this book doesn't deliver.

Part of Bova's planetary series, it continues a background situation of an Earth under the rule of fundamentalist regimes that have little use for scientific study and even less for individual freedoms. He also brings back a couple of characters, albeit he focuses his story on new ones.

The basic premise is that a huge spacecraft the size of a large asteroid containing a self-sustaining, essentially closed-loop ecosystem along with 10,000 people "serving a cadre of scientists" journeys to Saturn for extended study. The habitat is named Goddard. The principal experiment is kept from the inhabitants though. It is "to test the ability of a self-contained community to survive and develop a viable social system of its own."

During the 25-month voyage a villainous set of ringers planted by a fundamentalist group back on Earth plot to seize political control of the habitat. This group is sophomorically patterned after Hitler and his closest henchmen in the budding Nazi Party. Bova has never been strong on character development, but this group is more shallow than usual.

Bova's strength has always been the science he tantalizingly weaves into his stories. Unlike his previous books, there really is precious little science in this one, fiction or otherwise. It is more a study in seizing political power via subterfuge than it is about science. Even the life form in the Saturnian system is undeveloped and seemingly included merely as a sop to his sci fi fans.

In this book his strength is the continuation of several themes that together form the core of this series: outcasts beginning a new life on new worlds, the ubiquity of life within our Solar System, and the benefits of nano-technology if used properly. Another theme from the last few books carried over into this one is that religious fundamentalism can be oppressive and regressive. The overarching message from this series is that there is plenty to do and see, to explore and colonize, within the Solar System while we figure out how to get to the stars. Also, the Solar System may provide a safety valve for overpopulation and the adventurous spirit.

While the messages are positive, the book overall is flat and uninspired. If you're a real Bova fan, like me, then you'll want to go through it anyway in anticipation that it will set the stage for later books in the series. If you're not yet a Bova fan, read his other books first.

Rating:
Summary: Not a good read
Review: This book is possibly the worst so far of Bova's solar system novels and it was actually quite an effort for me to finish it. The story follows the voyage of a space colony out to Saturn and basically follows in minute, plodding and predictable detail the various power struggles amongst the colony elite as they seek to gain control. The premise of the story is pretty incredible to start with. Why would anyone send a space colony of 10,000 inhabitants out to a previously unexplored part of the solar system anyway?

There isn't any excitement or wonder of exploration as in 2001 A Space Odyssey, for example. The characters are all the usual Bova two dimensional unbelievable types and even the science, which is occasionally a good feature of Bova's novels, is missing.

I'm going to have to think long and hard about whether I want to buy any more books in this series.