Title Saturn Run Series --- Author John Sandford & Ctein Cover Art --- Publisher G.P. Putnam's Sons - 2015 First Printing G.P. Putnam's Sons - 2015 Category Science Fiction Warnings None Main Characters David Crowell [Crow], Sanders Darlington [Sandy], President Amanda Santeros, John Clover, Naomi Fang-Castro, Cassie Fiorella, Becca Johansson, Zhang Ming-Hoa, Joe Martinez, Cui Zhuo, Duan Me, Sun Yu Jie Main Elements Aliens

For fans of THE MARTIAN, an extraordinary new thriller of the future from #1 New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author John Sandford and internationally known photo-artist and science fiction aficionado Ctein. Over the course of thirty-seven books, John Sandford has proven time and again his unmatchable talents for electrifying plots, rich characters, sly wit, and razor-sharp dialogue. Now, in collaboration with Ctein, he proves it all once more, in a stunning new thriller, a story as audacious as it is deeply satisfying. The year is 2066. A Caltech intern inadvertently notices an anomaly from a space telescope something is approaching Saturn, and decelerating. Space objects don't decelerate. Spaceships do. A flurry of top-level government meetings produces the inescapable conclusion: Whatever built that ship is at least one hundred years ahead in hard and soft technology, and whoever can get their hands on it exclusively and bring it back will have an advantage so large, no other nation can compete. A conclusion the Chinese definitely agree with when they find out. The race is on, and an remarkable adventure begins an epic tale of courage, treachery, resourcefulness, secrets, surprises, and astonishing human and technological discovery, as the members of a hastily thrown-together crew find their strength and wits tested against adversaries both of this earth and beyond. What happens is nothing like you expect and everything you could want from one of the world's greatest masters of suspense."

I was pleasantly surprised to really enjoy this book. It starts off as your usual "rush to gather the perfect grew and build a ship" that appears in several books and many movies (movies like Armageddon, Interstellar, etc) but Sandford has a pleasantly light and humourous tone in his writing that makes this process, which takes a good chunk of the first part of the book, more interesting than it otherwise would have been. While both authors put a lot of thought and research into their work, and tried very hard to use feasible tech, I had to admit I was still unconvinced that you could take a space station, and in a timeline where people haven't even been to Mars, spontaneously turn it into a spaceship that could travel to Saturn without taking so long the crew would be dead before they arrived. It's not that the tech is unfeasible, but look at us, we've know since 2001 A Space Odyssey and before that if you had a rotating space station we'd have gravity...and yet we still haven't even tried to build something basic like that today. A lot of theories, little used in practice. Mind you, should there be a real space race, the funds would be there and things probably would start to happen. But it still stretched my disbelief.

That said, though it took up a good piece of the book, it wasn't the point of the book. In fact, even finding out what was hiding out in Saturn's rings wasn't the point either. I don't know if I should say anything about it here, it would spoil the surprise, but I thought it was an interesting surprise, not what I was expecting.

What I think the book was really about, wasn't what was out in space, but what people on Earth would do should something technologically advanced actually be found in space. Would we share? Would we use it to dominate everyone else? Times have changed and it's no longer the USA against the Russians, now the race is against the Chinese. The two superpowers on the verge of war (yet again) and so whether to share or not is kind of a big deal. Sinice this book was written by an American of course they come off are more noble, and avoid making embarassing mistakes, but at the same time, they were the ones that decided not to share, to sneak away with, ok not ill-gotten, it was freely available, but gotten gains just the same. My library just got Ball Lightning by Cixin Liu so I look forward to seeing this from the other perspective. Imagine James Bond written by the Russians.

So on the whole it was thought provoking, both what we learned about the alien artifacts and what we learn about ourselves. There's enough intrigue and sabotage to keep things exciting and of course there's the exploration of the future our where our technology may go one day, should we find the will and the money to invest in it. It's a little longer than it needs to be but I can still recommend it as a good read.

BTW, sometimes when you read a book you discover one of the author's other passions, let's just say photographers will appreciate the long discourses on lighting and composition more than I did.