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Saturn Returns by Sean Williams
01/03/2008 . Source: Tomas L. Martin 
Pub: Orbit. 291 page enlarged paperback. Price: £10.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-84149-518-7. Buy Saturn Returns in the USA - or Buy Saturn Returns in the UK  check out website: www.orbitbooks.co.uk
I've been thoroughly enjoying Australian author Sean Williams' fantasy series 'Books Of The Cataclysm', especially the third volume 'The Hanging Mountains', which was out in 2007. After reading a lot of his excellent and original fantasy work, I was very interested to read the author's Science Fiction output.
'Saturn Returns' is the first in its own series of space opera. Some 900 millennia from now, Imre Bergamasc is resurrected from a metal cylinder inscribed with the information of his DNA and life. Missing many of his recent memories due to the partial destruction of the information, Imre escapes those that recreated him to find out what has happened in the many years since his last memories.
Imre travels across the galaxy, taking hundreds of years as minutes and seconds by slowing his body clock down. He returns to the centre of the galaxy's civilisation, the Continuum, to find that a mysterious disaster called the Slow Wave has destroyed much of the organisation and worlds he once knew.
He meets up with some of his previous colleagues in the mercenary corps, including Alphin Freer, who has many bodies that share their memories and the angry and passionate Helwise. They follow a distress call from Emlee, another old acquaintance. On their arrival at the planet where Emlee has been hiding, a host of revelations and conspiracies appear.
Eventually, the characters band together to rescue another friend from a prison orbiting the gravity-ravaged space around a neutron star. The imprisoned character, the burly Render, is based on Williams' love of eighties singer Gary Numan and apparently every word of Render's dialogue is taken from Numan's songs.
Williams gets around the large distances between places by allowing his characters to have multiple bodies and to slow or accelerate their sense of time. This is a fascinating concept and well done but the fact that many of the characters can die multiple times and don't experience much in real time limits the reader's attachment to them.
This is a good book with some excellent world-building and when the action kicks into real-time it's an exciting and dynamic story. I do wonder if the very invention that makes 'Saturn Returns' such a unique solution to the normal problem of interstellar distances also limits its strengths as a drama.
The final twist is well done and everything sets up nicely for the sequel although I actually thought the twists would have been more interesting with a different character involved. Overall, I feel this is well worth a read but currently Williams' fantasy work is the more entertaining.
Tomas L. Martin
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