Customer Reviews

Missing Men of Saturn

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This is a "space opera" of the first order. I first read it as a very young man, shortly after it was published, and the work has stuck with me over all these years. I recently found a copy in a used book store (no, I won't sell it) and gave it a reread. The little boy in me enjoyed it as much now as when I first discovered it. Recommend this one highly and those interested in the history of this particular genre certainly should give it a close look.

Philip Latham (1902-1981) was the pseudonym of the astronomer Robert S. Richardson. He wrote a string of science books and articles, mostly for _Analog_ and mostly about astronomy. A couple of articles that I remember with fondness are the controversial "Nice Girls on Mars" (which elicited stern rebuttals from C.S. Lewis and Miriam Allen deFord) and "Space Technology of a Track Meet." Under the Philip Latham byline, he wrote about a score of science fiction short stories that frequently had about as much to do with magic as with astronomy. He wrote only two science fiction novels-- _Five Against Venus_ (1952) and _Missing Men of Saturn_ (1953), both juveniles for Winston.

Latham explains that when he was asked to write a science fiction novel set on Saturn, he found the task to be daunting. (Remember that in the early 1950s, there was very little that we knew about the planet with any certainty.) His solution was to turn to a nineteenth century astronomy book by Richard A. Proctor that confidently asserted that there was almost certainly life on Saturn. He used Proctor's picture of Saturn as the basis for his novel.

Latham then takes the interesting step of populating his novel with less than sterling characters. His hero, Dale Sutton, is that most obnoxious of creatures, the Big Man on Campus at the Space Academy. Sutton gets assigned to a beat-up space tub called the _Albatross_, and the crew begins to take him down a few pegs. But the crew are not wholly virtuous, either. Many of them are uneducated and superstitious-- traits that cause them to balk when they are assigned to investigate the mystery surrounding another crew that has vanished before them on Saturn. And they are traits that will contribute to a tragedy at the end of the novel.

Give this novel a try. It is solidly, if unspectacularly, written. The cover by Alex Schomburg depicts a spaceship tilting precarously on the top of a lava crusted cliff with an erupting volcano in the near background and a smoky, acerbic atmosphere. We now know that Saturn is predominantly a gas giant. But given the state of knowledge at this time, we can hardly fault Latham or Schomburg on scientific grounds.