Saturn's Race [Mass Market Paperback]

Sounds like a promising beginning for a story. Unfortunately, SATURN'S RACE fizzles somewhere along the line. Lenore gets part of her memory erased (including the crucial bit of info), which has a seriously negative effect on her life. She embarks on a quest to find out what happened to her and to get her mind back, but in the process she increasingly becomes a sideline in this story while the focus shifts to Chaz Kato, a man Lenore became involved with while on Xanadu.

SATURN'S RACE is often fast-paced and it raises some very relevant issues about man's future on Earth. Unfortunately, like Lenore, the story seems to get lost in its own shifting focus. It raises issues, but never provides any satisfactory resolution. Characters that seem important at one point become unimportant, and vice versa. In the end, it all bogs down in its own confusion and cliches.

I've read a lot of books either authored or co-authored by Larry Niven. Some were very good and among my favorites in the scifi genre. SATURN'S RACE, however, is not one of them. It is, in my opinion, mediocre. Does that mean it went over my head, as someone has suggested? No. Under my head, perhaps, but I think it's possible to "get" this book and still be underwhelmed by it. For me, it went briskly but I had had more than enough by the time I finished it. Ultimately, I don't read scifi to get other people's thoughts on the human condition. I read scifi for entertainment. SATURN'S RACE wasn't overly entertaining.

But, in the midst of defeating the bad guy, who is such an obviously grotesque comic-book villian, the book forgets to actually make any argumenta at all against either the thesis or the solution provided. Nor does it suggest any alternatives.

If it had, it would have been 5 stars. But it doesn't, which leaves this reader thinking - Why not do it that way? Better than thermonuclear war, don't you think? Better than mass casualties from sophisticated biological war, no? Or do the authors prefer those two options with corpses rotting in the streets? Better than drowning our cities from global warming, eh? We are facing massive casualties whichever way you cut it, may as well be as nice as possible. So what IS wrong with the Kali Option?

Fact is, fellow earth-dwellers, we really are faced with exactly such a crisis. We are watching the world hit the wall right now, and we will see a massive denouement that will make the plot of "Saturn's Race" look sweet. So how can the authors argue against such a merciful course without bloodshed, in order to blunder on into a future where far worse horrors beyond imagining loom? What sort of peacock drivel-tripe philosophy is that?

This insipid generation taking control of the world just now should have started to grasp how incredibly quickly the world can spiral into war. All it takes is a few thousand people killed in the right provocation, and kaboom - it's on. This is especially true when the generations have no experience of what real war is like, only blap from TV announced by the likes of Geraldo.

The world is a tinder-box sitting next to a powderkeg, just waiting for the right spark to really blow sky-high. The primary drivers are want, overpopulation, greed, religion and insipid naivete. We will have this crash, and well over a billion are almost certain to die of it. A billion these days scarcely scratches the surface. A billion people, as described in the book, just creates about 20 years of elbow room is all. Hardly worth sneezing for in planetary terms. Big deal. All replaced in a few years.

A book like this that begs the question of what is wrong with the "Kali Option" turns itself into one more insipid little entertainment while flirting with asking real, hard questions.

But the questions remain, and the solutions are all ugly as sin. That's the reality of the world we live in when you put down this book.