Customer Reviews

Saturn Returns

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was an impulse choice for me at the local B&N. Sean Williams other works with Sean Dix haven't ever done very much for me. But this one, it was interesting.

Its a murder mystery - one trying to solve a murder approximately 200 millennia old though. This is an interstellar setting, but one where light speed is the absoloute limit and mankind has reached throughout the galaxy and diversified in many, many ways. In some ways its like Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series, but not quite. One major difference is the way humans characterize themselves - singelton (single ID, capable of gestalt), Prime (old style human) and fort. The dominant form of mankind are the forts, gestalt humans that have slowed their time sense to a galactic scale (yet are still able to interact with and beat normal or accelerated humans (I know I had a hard time with it too)).

In Saturn Returns, Imre Bergamasc gets his old unit the Corps back together after being reconstructed from a partially destroyed recording beyond the galaxy's rim to determine who killed him. Along the way we get a decent look at the Mandala supersystem.

It's interesting, it deals with identity, what it is and what makes a person - memory, experience, time sense, etc. For that its interesting and worth checking out the expected sequel (the ending opens it up with Earth as a destination). But, I think Williams needs to work a little more on explaining his setting somewhere and perhaps firming up his neuroscience.

The old wake up in the future, sex changed, memory lost, surrounded by bizarre intelligences story.


Oh, wait, that's a new one on me. It also doesn't get any less crazypants or frantic from there.

Now admittedly a couple of things in this were distracting. The name of the main character, Imre, now a woman, and the word Saturn. This means in my brain, or close enough too, Saturn Girl, Legion of Superheroes. Imre is a posthuman, yes, hanging out with Lightning Lad and from Titan, no.

Also the Luminous thing, having just looked at that book by Greg Egan for another reason today, and having a few posthuman similarities that was a bit distracting.

Basically, Williams has delivered the goods again. Packed into what is these days a short book (although part of a trilogy it appears) is a whole heap of good New Space Opera. Not as bleak as Reynolds, there are still plenty of surprises, different forms of humans, both normal and post, spaceships, Warhammeresque religions, huge distances and shooting at people. Take Reynolds, blend with a bit of Stross, maybe add a pinch of Simon R. Green's Deathstalker and you might get a bit of an idea of the flavour of this novel.

Towards the end you start to get a look at what the various characters from Imre's earlier life really were up to, and the same for his particular incarnation. Being posthumans, this could mean what several different varieties of their selves had been up to, in various times and parts of space.

Now all he has to do is keep it up for the next book, something I will definitely be looking forward too, despite not being a Gary Numan fan.

Given the stuff packed into this book, most of us will find his appendix and its information quite useful, I think.

I loved Sean Williams' "Metal Fatigue", but I'd pretty much skipped everything else by him until now, picking up "Saturn Returns" on the basis of the first few pages.

The goods seemed to be there - hard science fiction; a thriller subtext of memory loss and emotional disconnection from the past; and enough introspection from Imre Bergamasc, our obviously flawed mercenary cum hero, to really get inside his head.

And while I've read it, the whole premise of the novel makes absolutely no sense at all. Because it's supposedly 150 THOUSAND years into this guys future - and I went back and checked that I'd got that right a couple of times to see if this nonsensical novel was tricking me in a subtle way - and despite his being rebuilt from some scratchy old DNA recording of his life, all of his friends (and enemies) are still just hanging around, waiting for him to come home. That's despite a galaxy spanning disaster that knocked everything back to some kind of technological dark ages. Oh yeah, don't forget to add in the thousand or so years it takes him to travel some serious parsecs at something less than the speed of light, during which our hero Imre just slows down his body clock so centuries of travel whip past in the blink of an eye. Great party trick, but it still doesn't mean that time stops in the rest of the Universe as well.

Then there was the concept of ages-old, galaxy spanning intelligences that use a single method of communication and literally fall to pieces when their transmitters go down, as if that's not going to happen as an everyday occurance! What about distributed processing, store-and-forward messaging and redundancy? The speed of light has explicitly not been transcended in this novel - no warp drives or hyperjumping here - yet Williams glosses over the consequences of this and strangely writes as if everyone would have real time communication between star systems and beyond. Or not, because sometimes he declares the issues of cosmic distance yet gleefully ignores them a few pages on.

In the end I found it impossible to reconcile the concept of this being Imre's deep, deep future when everyone treated it like he'd popped out to the corner store for milk and bread and came back a bit later than expected because he'd been nattering with the neighbours on the way. But hang on, to them that's exactly what's it like, because there are other copies of Imre floating around, doing evil and generally causing mayhem. But, and this is where it really started to creak and groan for me, Imre(s) and his motley crew(s) stick together pretty much all through those 150,000+ years, so that when our flawed Imre arrives back "home", nothing much actually is different. So all the interesting implications and observations that someone displaced by so much could reflect on are ignored. Considering that language evolves enough in the span of centuries that casual readers now struggle with Shakespeare, the idea that Imre could even communicate with anyone is farcial.

Ultimately the structural flaws in "Saturn Returns" were way too much bother to overcome. Evolution of any kind - apart from Imre's personal journey of ethics - is ignored to the point that, disappointingly, I'm not even a little bit compelled to buy the concluding books in this series. It's basically another good kids SciFi book that will help get them hooked on the genre, but there's not much here for adults.

I could not wait for a new book by Sean Williams and Shane Dix (I own all three of their superb series) and of course, I was very willing to give this one my utmost favorable attention even withot the partnership. What a soft porn bore! His ex-writing partner must have been adding some seriousness to past ouevre. Because you have nothing here but crazy screwing romps across eternal space and time by characters with medieval morality, pardon "outback" mentality. I already bought Genotaxis but afraid now. Mediocre books make subway rides all so more taxing!

This book has an extremely complicated story. By about three-quarters of the way through, it seemed that the story was too big for the number of pages in the book. By the time I got to the end, I found that I was right - this book has no ending. I hate it when a book has no external indication that it is part of a larger series. None of the complex plot lines or mysteries are resolved. I spent the last quarter of the book reluctantly wading through the trivial tie-ups with the expectation that on the last page it would say "to be continued", but it doesnt even say that!

Sean Williams has put a lot of thought into this novel, but I found it takes a fair amount of patience to get through the story in order to appreciate his future vision where humanity has found a way to have a galactic society despite the limitations imposed by the speed of light barrier - and then lost it. Great start to the book and some great ideas, but I would have enjoyed it more if the novel had more pace. There are two sequels to see the author's full vision if I have the patience. If only I could change my time perception like the book characters! Good to see some supportive appendices included.

I've found "Saturn Returns" by pure chance during a business trip at a bookstore and must say I am glad I found it! Even with a very hard, 13- to 14-hour work schedule, I read it in just one week. A real page turner for sure.

The book is crammed with interesting, "high-concept" ideas, and is written in fluid, easy to read and very pleasant prose. Although its galactic scope and mind-blowing time scale put it firmly in the realm of space opera, the book is "realistic" enough in its science to please hard sci-fi fans (I count myself as one).

The treatment given to the concept of individual identity is very provoking and by far the highest point of the book. Most impressive, mr. Williams is able to provide enough information to the reader about it and how it influences society at large with a extremely low volume of infodumps. The realities of galactic society, both past and present, are presented through the story in a fluid, natural way, without falling in the lecture mode so often used.

Overall, I enjoyed this book immensely and will buy the reminder books in the trilogy for sure.

In the very distant future, a person wakes up on a ship with no memory and his rescuer the Jinc, a gestalt mind with its people all part of that mind. They find him floating in space before he was vaporized by nukes and they have put him back together. One of the only mistakes is they made him a woman when Imre Bergamasc was always a man. When he fails to remember information they want from him, they want to absorb in their gestalt. A mysterious voice abets his escape by opening up a ship closed tothe jinc.

Imre learns that the Continuum is destroyed, the worlds no longer looped together. He finds that the next step in humanity's evolution is no more and communicating on the Line is gone. The Slow Wave was responsible for all this yet nobody know if it was a man made weapon. Imre meets up with his former members of the corps and they soon start working together. It seems there is a connection between the Slow Wave and Imre's murder and finding it will tell them what direction their lives should take if they are able to gather reliable information without getting killed by their enemies.

Sean Williams entertains his readers with a bleak and dark future of which the tragedy is that the galaxy was once golden. Imre is the star, focus and the man with the answer although between his amnesia and the fact that he is a Singleton makes it difficult to put the pieces of his memory back together. Mates of the hero are spread throughout the universe slowly but find themselves reaching out to the members of the Corp from clues they left behind. This is space opera at its very best with its exciting scenes and the descriptions of a puzzle that destroyed the structure of the known universe. Readers will like Imre, a combination of a hard and vulnerable person who needs to find out what he has done to change the known universe.

Harriet Klausner

Saturn Returns was an exceptional book, reminding me of far-future master works like Marrow, and Ring. Though the science in the book is not as "hard" as in other authors books, the ideas Williams brings to light are still marvelous, unique, and mind boggling. The literature of the book is excelent, something past readers of williams would expect. All togather a very good read.

This is the first book I read by Sean Williams, and I like it very much, a grand setting (the entire galaxy), a mystery to solve (although we'll probably need to wait until book 3 of the triligy to find out the final answer, but there're enough hints to keep the reader interested), and the fate of the human race hang in the balance, what more can you ask for? And I have to give the author credit for not using FTL when writing a galactic spanning story, very interesting approach.