Saturn Run by John Sandford and Ctein : Review

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.

As the first book by John Sandford and Ctein that I have read, I really enjoyed Saturn Run as I was reading it. I read it pretty much non-stop from start to finish, stopping only to do pesky things like eat, sleep or go to work. Yet when I look back at it now, I really can’t remember why I enjoyed it as much as I did at the time. I’ve tried a few times since then to reread it and have been unable to get more than a few chapters in on every attempt.

I found the questions the story asked to be pretty interesting, and the answers to be dead on to what I think would actually happen in such a scenario. What would we do if an alien spaceship was discovered in our solar system? Try to capture it of course, and what would we be willing to do, to make sure the mission was a success? Whatever we thought we had to, to keep our enemies from finding out about it, or at the very least, getting there first.

Really looking back at the book, the one thing I find myself really wishing, was that the authors hadn’t gotten so bogged down in the details. Normally I enjoy when an author puts so much research into a book to get all the little things right, but with Saturn Run I feel like the excruciatingly detailed science really slowed the pace of the book down, and took away a little bit from the story.

So to sum it up, I enjoyed the book while reading it, but now I really can’t say why. I doubt I will ever read it again, and to me that says more about what I thought of the book than anything else.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.