Robert L. Forward
Saturn Rukh (1997)
Reviewed: 2001-10-24

I seem to have read this book before, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Was it Dragon's Egg? Or Rocheworld? Camelot 30K? Saturn Rukh just reads too much like any of several previous Forward novels.

In an unspecified but obviously fairly close future, a team of six astronauts and scientists are crammed into a small spacecraft for a long journey to Saturn, where they will drift under a balloon through the upper atmosphere of the giant planet and explore the life forms that have been found there. This is a hard SF novel, so Forward limits the amount of magic. The key potions are "meta", metastable helium, a rocket fuel that gives more than six times the exhaust velocity of burning liquid hydrogen and oxygen, and radiation medicine: Just pop a pill and radiation damage will go away. Yeah, right. Given these two ingredients, Forward weaves his tale of interplanetary voyage. On the serious science side, he introduces us to the idea of space tethers.

As usual there's a carefully designed spacecraft, the Sexdent, with a smart computer and extravehicular robots. Despite Forward's obvious attempts, the crew never really comes alive, settling us with cardboard characters that could have been pulled right out of previous novels, and that show all the emotional maturity of teenagers. In painfully clumsy exposition the professional astronauts keep explaining to each other basic facts about the Saturnian system and their mission all of them would be familiar with. The author conjures up some interesting creatures in the imaginary Saturnian biosphere, but even the intelligent aliens come across as rather flat and boring. To provide for some drama, the expected unexpected things go wrong, and our dear explorers are threatend with becoming stranded.

This novel is generic Forward, but the taste has gone stale.


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