|
|
Check out our free classified ads
Cradle of Saturn by James P. Hogan
Cover art by Dru Blair
Published by Baen Books
Reviewed by Leigh Kimmel
What if everything we knew about the Solar System were wrong -- and were proved to us in a way so dramatic that it defeats all attempts to deny it? This is the world Hogan creates in this novel, of a world where the cosmological theories of German psychologist Emmanuel Velikovsky are more than crackpot notions.
On Earth the space program is dying, in spite of efforts of entreprenuers like Landen Keene, who has built a fusion-powered rocket that can refuel with any suitable substance, not just refined fuels. But some years earlier a group of idealists founded a colony on one of the moons of Saturn, dedicated to a society without money or greed, where people do their jobs because one should do one's utmost and be one's best, not because one has to. And their scientists have made some strange new breakthroughs, and are returning to the homeworld to share their knowlege and expand it.
Just in time, for Jupiter has vomited forth a planet-sized new body, named Athena for the Greek myth of the goddess who burst forth fully formed from the brow of Zeus. Terran scientists are certain that it will shoot out into deep space and be lost, but the Kronian scientists warn that their understanding is incomplete, and they must not be so complacent.
Amidst an atmosphere of suspicion and treachery among the very humans who claim to most value open inquiry, Athena makes a seemingly impossible turn around the Sun to come straight at the Earth, bringing unspeakable devestation. Now the Kronians' outpost among Saturn's moons is the only hope for technological civilization -- but before Landon Keene can take it, he must make a desperate cross-country trek to find the woman he loves and the child he fathered. Can he find them before it is too late?
Click here to order The Cradle of Saturn in hardcover.
Click here to order The Cradle of Saturn in hardcover.
Review posted January 21, 2004
Want to look for other titles of interest?
Take me back to the Billion Light-Year Bookshelf booklist
Take me back to the bookstore entrance
