Tor - 2006, Printed 2006, 418 pages
ISBN: 978-0-765-34315-4
Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Read: July 2010 (at age 32)
First time read
What to Expect:
This is one of many of Bova’s books based on the solar system (his “Grand Tour”), which do follow each other, but can mostly be read out of order without too much being lost. Some characters do appear from other novels.
So far in this series, I’ve read Venus, Jupiter, and Mercury, and Saturn. The first three stood alone fairly well, but Saturn is the direct prequel to this book, and the two are really a single story separated into two books.
From the back cover:
“After months of travel, the colony ship Goddard is finally in orbit around Saturn, carrying more than 10,000 dissidents, rebels, and visionaries seeking a new life. Among Goddard’s missions is the study of Titan, which offers the tantalizing possibility that life may exist amid its windswept islands and chill black seas.
When the exploration probe Titan Alpha mysteriously fails after reaching the moon’s surface, long-buried tensions surface among the colonists. The mission’s chief scientist is wracked with despair as he sees his life’s work unravel. Goddard’s chief administrator takes ruthless measures to hold onto power as a rash of suspicious incidents threatens to undermine his authority. And a retired astronaut is forced to risk his life in a last, desperate attempt to salvage the probe.
Torn by intrigue, sabotage, and an awesome discovery that could threaten human space exploration, a handful of courageous men and women must fight for the survival of their colony, and for the destiny of the human race.”
My comments: (spoilers ahoy!)
Overall:
This book picked up right where Saturn left off, and that, for me, was not a particularly good thing. I still didn’t really care about the characters, the big reveals fell flat, and there was a particularly poorly reasoned major plot point – the election campaign platforms - that just made me mad as I read the book.
Rating: 2
Characters:
Weak. About the same as in Saturn, although not so many of the villians were left. The characters still didn’t resonate with me, although a larger role for Pancho Lane (one of the recurring characters in the series) did help a bit. Overall, the characters felt more like cardboard cut-outs (the dashing hero, the mad scientist, etc.) rather than real people.
Premise:
Fair. The story revolved around learning what was going on around the habitat, which was ok, but the conflict seemed more like a show in the vein of American Chopper – artificial deadlines and conflict not because it was part of the story, but just because it needed to be there.
Setting:
Fair. Interesting enough, I guess. It was a space station around Saturn, after all. The environment on Titan itself was well done.
Plot:
Fair. Most of it was ok, although I didn’t ever really feel tension or even particularly care how things were going to turn out. There were the discovery arcs, which went all right. A couple of unexpected discoveries occurred, which was nice.
Then there were the romance arcs, which mostly went as romance arcs are expected to go. There was one that didn’t go quite as expected, but it fell flat because so little attention was spent on the characters. I didn’t think these arcs were particularly interesting, even for romance stories.
And then there was the political arc, which is where I got mad at the author. The major conflict in this arc was the election race between Holly Lane, the nominal main character, and Malcolm Eberly, the carry-over villain from Saturn. Each of their platforms held exactly one plank that mattered. For Eberly, it was to mine the rings of Saturn for water, and risk a war over the life forms located in the rings. For Lane, it was to repeal the zero population growth protocols in effect. So far, so good.
But the way that Mr. Bova handled it, almost all the women wanted to have babies. Almost all the men wanted sex with no consequences. The two that were shown on camera in support of Lane were her boyfriend, and some guy that got introduced for the sole purpose of getting sex withheld from him until he signed on. This doesn’t strike me as realistic at all. If it was one character, ok, maybe the character just feels that way. But every character thought that this was just the way things were. Well, Mr. Bova’s been around for quite a while. Maybe this book was written back when society perhaps had more of a gender divide. Nope, written in 2006. As a fellow who quite wanted children of his own, and who knows many other men who feel the same way, I got a bit mad.
Granted, we are talking about people in the future in an oversized drain pipe living off Saturn, which, as of right now, is not particularly realistic. But people are pretty much people – do the people well, and I can accept wherever they live and whatever funky technology they’re using. This arc just reinforced to me how poor the characters were.
Readability:
Good. Other than the bits of plot where I got mad at the author, the book flowed well.
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