Barnes and Niven Lose Saturn's Race Without Ever Getting on the Track
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Author: Larry Niven and Steven Barnes
Title: Saturn's Race Genre: science fiction Surely, writing science fiction must be a simple task, right? All one need do is logically project current science into the future, and then build some inconsequential little plot around the predictions. Robots with artificial intelligence, for instance, are a logical extension of the computer -- so we'll just plot ourselves a robot that's slightly defective and [murderous / emotional / loving / immortal / whatever]. Travel between the stars seems but a simple matter of bigger and better craft than we already possess for our cautious baby steps in space. Let's all journey through space to a strange planet that has a [water / desert / ice / airless] environment and [murderous / emotional / loving / immortal / whatever] inhabitants. See how easy it is to craft your plot! Oddly though, in recent years, science fiction seems to have not expanded, but somewhat retracted the reach of its gaze. While authors of past generations penned vast tales of time travel, sagas of galactic empires, and death-ray-wielding aliens; a large chunk of the current scifi writers has concentrated its prognostications on the near future. Scifi that forecasts into the near future is the forte of one writing team, a team that includes an author who already possesses an illustrious history in the FTL-alien-time warp school of writing. He's Hugo/Nebula Award winner Larry Niven, and these days he's co-writing with Steven Barnes (less military and militant than Niven's previous partner, Jerry Pournelle). Barnes and Niven aren't a brand-new partnership, however; they've worked together on several previous novels. Perhaps their best known collaboration is Dreampark, published in 1981. That novel featured role-playing games, virtual reality, and a little taste of mystery; all rolled into a single fascinating package. The team's latest effort, Saturn's Race, takes on different subject matter: this offering deals with the yet another technology of vast potential, the augmentation of human and animal intelligence and physical capabilities. In other words, think Borg. Welcome to the Island of Xanadu The year is 2022, and our planet has changed dramatically in just two decades. Worldwide, society rests uneasily under the guidance of a largely self-appointed "Council" comprising powerful industrialists. People everywhere have become increasingly dependent on the largesse of six mammoth, manmade islands arrayed along the equator. These islands supply much of the world's power, and its foodstuffs as well. Xanadu is the oldest and most powerful of these Islands. In addition to power and protein, Xanadu also exports science -- especially technology of the sorts that the populace of the "landlubber" nations might find a bit troubling. The powers that control Xanadu also have access to other technology that, well, isn't widely available (to say the least). Meet Chaz and Lenore It's graduation night, and the cream of the this year's crop of graduate students from western North America has assembled on Xanadu. Among them is the beautiful and brilliant Lenore Myles, a scholarship student at USC studying biomechanical engineering. Wandering through the magnificent gardens of Xanadu, sweet Lenore bumps into one of the island's most famous residents: Chadwick "Chaz" Kato III, the grandson of one of the founders of modern computing science. Their meeting -- not entirely accidental, we (and Lenore) eventually discover -- culminates in a night of passion. In the morning when Chaz offers Lenore a Xanaduan job, she's immediately suspicious of a variation on the old "honey pot" scam. To assuage her suspicions and anger, Chaz provides her a temporary security clearance equal to his own, and sends her out to look over the island in any way she wishes. That wasn't a good idea, Chaz -- you spaced out that you had just hacked yourself the highest security clearance possible, and then you accidentally passed your illicit powers on to Lenore. Murphy's Law is, of course, immediately enforced, so innocent little Lenore stumbles over what may well be the most sinister plot ever devised by a human mind. Worse, this heinous scheme is even now coming to fruition. She flees the island, with a mysterious A/I entity that calls itself Saturn dogging her every step. To paraphrase a certain redneck TV deputy, she's in a heap o' trouble now! Saturn Runs Rings Around the Competition The honorable Chaz -- thoroughly smitten with that rare and radiant maiden, Lenore -- makes a last-ditch effort to save her life. In doing so, however, he sets in motion a process that can eventually destroy her mind. Unable to flee Xanadu himself -- for he bears his own terrible secret -- Chaz clandestinely works to track down the mysterious and sinister Saturn, though he is hampered by being unaware of just what happened to direct Saturn's murderous rage at Lenore. Over the passage of a year, all the pieces of the strange puzzle join to form a maelstrom that threatens to destroy civilization. It's left to Chaz, Lenore, and a handful of aboriginals to identify and defeat Saturn, and thereby save the world. And, of course, they do. Or do they? Technology Run Amok The focus of Saturn's Race shines on a single emerging science. That science is the concept of using technological means -- microchips, servomotors, transplantation medicine, genetic alteration, even nannotechnology -- to enhance both the intelligence and physical capabilities of nonhuman beings. The Xanadu scientists began exactly where one might expect an island of scientists to start: with dolphins. But then, for inexplicable reasons, they shifted their experimentation to sharks. Sharks! great whites, tigers, makos, hammerheads; nature's perfect killing machine; a phylum with precious little brain to enhance in the first place. Augmented dolphins, sharks, crops, humans, even an augmented elephant make their appearance in the text, each more grotesque and terrifying than the last. And the most terrifying of all is the being that calls itself Saturn. Barnes and Niven paint a horrific future, one in which a cadre of scientists have worked beyond the pale, in secret, with no one to answer to but themselves. Perhaps the fruits of their labor are far more sophisticated, but they are otherwise no different from the monster created by Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein. Except, in this case, torch-wielding villagers cannot storm the castle to rid themselves of an unwanted neighbor. It's enough to give one pause, eh? Muddy Science, Logical Failing, and a Muddy Message As a scientist myself, I had minor problems with the science of Saturn's Race: not with augmentation technology (what would I know about biomechanical engineering?) but some of the other science that's casually inserted in the plot. For instance, those six-kilometer wide islands were built by accretion, of a substance they call "seacrete" [1] that precipitates from seawater on an electrolysis grid. The enormous power necessary -- and the power that Xanadu and the other islands sell -- is "extracted by harvesting the ocean's heat differential" (p. 45). Neither of these technologies has been developed as of today, and it appears to me that neither could be so well-developed (even if actually possible) within the short time frame. But questionable science is a mere side issue; the message is far more critical. On the logical front, suffice it to say that the heinous plot uncovered by Lenore has a hole in it you could drive a truck through. Anyone who's read the book and missed it is welcome to contact me, but I already get lambasted for the amount of plot detail I provide... Several previous novels by Barnes and Niven have positively gushed about the role of visionary corporations, working minus stultifying governmental regulation, in the advancement of science. For example, Dreampark is the tale of a futuristic version of Disneyland for grownups, all of which has been built on research by the Dreampark Corporation scientists. Several times within Saturn's Race, the authors snipe at environmentalists and animal-rights activists; including creating as secondary villains a tiny anti-Council guerilla group named the "Spinners." Niven (and Niven and Barnes') sometime co-author Jerry Pournelle is exceedingly fond of interjecting anti -environmentalist and -regulation statements into his work, inventing in his contempt the ultra-extremist "FrOMATEs" (Friends of Man and The Earth) and the pseudo-verb "to Proxmire." [2] The text of Saturn's Race is, on its surface, merely another paean to the beauty and wisdom of an unfettered scientific community. But this inadvertent? re-telling of Dr. Frankenstein's tale hides any beauty, giving lie to the supposed wisdom of the scientists of Xanadu. Notes [1] - I can't figure out what seacrete's composition might be. Seawater's salinity is 35 parts per thousand, but it's mainly NaCl. I guess you could precipitate a solid that's mostly sodium (a scary proposition). But the precipitation of millions of cubic meters of this stuff -- an island several kilometers in diameter with all its superstructure (and the necessary "keel") -- would sure make a large part of the ocean brackish. Not a good idea to me... [2] - A reference to onetime Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, who crusaded for the removal of "pork" from the federal budget. He used to give out a "golden fleece" award to appropriations that incurred his wrath. Apparently he helped kill some scientific research that Pournelle fancied. |