Saturn Rukh: Amazon.ca: ROBERT L FORWARD: Books

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Five carefully selected people, each with the chance to earn $1 billion. The catch? They have to descend into Saturn's upper atmosphere and establish a factory that will produce meta, the fuel that powers interplanetary flight. With only enough meta to get them to Saturn, failure will cost them their lives. And all too soon the crew becomes marooned on the back of what they dub a Rukh, a 4-kilometer-long creature that swims in Saturn's upper atmosphere and has two brains, male and female. This engaging book by physicist Robert L. Forward evokes the sense of wonder of old-time science fiction.

From Library Journal

Three male and two female human specialists are paid $1 billion each to voyage to Saturn to convert helium in the upper atmosphere into metahelium fuel. When part of their apparatus is swallowed by one of the giant, flying, birdlike creatures they call rukhs, the crew finds a way to communicate and cooperate with the rukhs so both survive. The hard science, while technical, lends credence to Forward's (Camelot 30K, Tor, 1993) suspenseful story. Highly recommended for sf collections.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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First Sentence
GOT A JOB FOR YOU. PAYS A BILLION. The message blinked at the top of the screen three times, then disappeared. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

13 Reviews

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

3.8 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)

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3.0 out of 5 stars Old-Fashioned SF, Sep 25 2003

By

J. COMER (Hesperia CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Saturn Rukh (Mass Market Paperback)

Spoilers!!

This is typical Forward: wooden characters whose interactions with each other are totally unbelievable, endless detail of beautiful, real near-future science, silly excuse-for-a-plot, and gorgeous, staggering vistas of real otherworlds and their realistic, amazingly creative inhabitants. The ruus, huge gasbags flying in the atmosphere of Saturn, are far more interesting than the humans who contact them, but Forward always does this. The scenes are giant, brilliantly colored, animated Chesley Bonestell movies: the ruus diving to hunt; the humans "climbing down Saturn's Rings" with the aid of the (real) Hoytether, a kind of super rope which Forward marketed; the funeral of an aged rukh whose flockmates sing as she falls endlessly to the lethal gas layers below; the final battle with an alien monster myth-made-real. If you value character and plot, take your business elswhere. For science and the sheer pleasure of the view, read this!

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5.0 out of 5 stars Great Hard SF, April 26 2003

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Too Cold in Madison (Madison, WI, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Saturn Rukh (Mass Market Paperback)

I loved this book. I could hardly put it down. Being a science-oriented person, I had no problem with all the science. It did not seem dry or boring at all. The speculation as to the nature of intelligent life in a non-Terran ecosystem was fascinating. I highly recommend this book.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Another good book by Forward, Sep 10 2001

By

R. Bagula "Roger L. Bagula" (Lakeside, Ca United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Saturn Rukh (Mass Market Paperback)

Can life exist in a gas giant's atmosphere? Intelligent life is
a hard thing to find anywhere in the universe and this book gives us a whale of a story about a sea so far away. A mission of modern science has been to find other intelligent life and communicate with it. Very few unique kinds of intelligent life have been invented by hard science fiction writers. Robert Forward is one of the best at it.

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Most recent customer reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Don't Read This Book. . .
. . .for depth of character development! Like many of Forward's novels, there is a definite weakness in that department. Read more

Published on Dec 21 2000 by David Zampino

2.0 out of 5 stars Rolling Stones grown up (and having lost their magic touch)
This reads like an attempt at an adult version of "Space Family Stone" / "The Rolling Stones" by Robert Heinlein and as such it does not quite make the... Read more

Published on Aug 6 2000