he newly built space colony Goddard, a huge spinning cylinder, leaves orbit with more than 10,000 people aboard on a three-year journey to Saturn. The expedition is funded mostly by Holy Disciples, one of the fundamentalist religious groups of the New Morality that controls Earth, and its real purpose is known only to Capt. James Wilmot, who will surrender control of the society of scientists, engineers, political dissidents and religious zealots aboard Goddard once they reach Saturn.
Holly Lane works in the human resources department for Malcolm Eberly, with whom she is in passionate but unrequited love. Holly's older sister Poncho, remaining on the Moon, pays stuntman Manuel Gaeta and nanotech scientist Dr. Kristin Cardenas to watch over Holly. Eberly himself intends to ensure that he is elected as all-powerful leader by the time Goddard reaches Saturn. He immediately begins to assemble a trusted but ruthless crew of Holy Disciples and uses them to assure his victory in a three-way election while blackmailing Capt. Wilmot to remove his influence.
Holly finally begins to uncover Eberly's plot when she figures out that Eberly's ruthless head of security, Col. Kananga, murdered her friend, Don Diego. Holly must go into hiding for weeks in the system of underground maintenance tunnels while Eberly's henchmen try to find and kill her to stay in power. Meanwhile, stuntman Gaeta, with the help of scientists Cardenas and Nadia Wunderly, takes a dangerous flight through the rings of Saturn and makes a momentous discovery, while Holly must find a way to thwart the evil plans of the Holy Disciples to rule Goddard.
Traditional hard SF far from the cutting edge
Saturn is the latest novel in Bova's "Grand Tour" series about the exploration of the solar system, joining Jupiter, The Precipice, Venus and a number of earlier novels published over the past decade. Saturn includes some characters from earlier novels in the series, most notably Poncho Lane and Kris Cardenas, as well as the Holy Disciples and other New Morality groups plaguing mankind.
Saturn is a worthy addition to Bova's series, with all the ingredients needed for successful hard-SF adventure: a compelling plot, engaging and interesting protagonists, despicably evil antagonists, some momentary sense of wonder and interesting science both expository and plot-related. Bova, as we've come to expect, mixes these standard elements quite professionally to create a good, traditional, SF adventure novel.
But Saturn is in almost every aspect merely adequate, and never approaches the current cutting edge of SF. Of the 10,000 people aboard Goddard, only a dozen or two have any role in the novel, with the rest seeming like faceless non-entities, to the point where credibility is strained in some parts of the narrative. The characters sometimes feel dated, as when Holly maintains her romantic fixation on Malcolm Eberly after getting the cold shoulder for years. None of the Holy Disciples has any real religious convictions, short-circuiting the continuation of themes in earlier novels. All of the science and technology consists of standard off-the-shelf SF ideas, with only some run-of-the-mill nanotechnology going beyond what we could do today. The "secret purpose" of the mission is a disappointing non-event. Even the startling sense-of-wonder-invoking scientific discovery at the end is too similar to those in other SF novels to pack a full punch.
