Turn the Pages

Although John Camp (writing as John Sandford) has made most of his name writing about cops investigating crimes, he's had a couple of hits with novels about the computer hacker and thief Kidd that range into the techno-thriller category. It involves a space voyage to Saturn and an encounter with aliens, but his 2015 collaboration with photographer and physicist Ctein (I have no idea how to pronounce it. Or why) Saturn Run is as much in that vein as it is science fiction.

A random set of images from a telescope calibration shows an object moving towards a gap in Saturn's rings and decelerating -- something no natural object could do. The United States has learned of the object first but doesn't really have any ships available to make a journey that long. China has a probe planned for a Mars voyage, so the U.S. must try to repurpose a space station for the voyage and get underway to reach the alien artifact before the Chinese can. They develop a way to do this, crew the ship and get it underway. Even though the Chinese ship has already blasted off for Saturn, the more advanced propulsion of the U.S ship, the USSS Richard M. Nixon, means it will arrive first. If nothing goes wrong, that is, and there's no shortage of people and interest groups who would like to see something do just that.

Since he's set his book about 50 years into the future, Sandford doesn't have to posit a great many cultural changes, One of his protagonists, Sandy Darlington, could stand in for Virgil Flowers in that series of books without too much trouble. There are enough tweaked details to set a different stage than the one we live on in 2015, but not so many we don't recognize the people. In that area, Run reads like a Heinlein or Allen Steele hard sci-fi novel, paying the kind of attention to detail that distinguishes both authors. It of course most resembles Arthur C. Clarke's  2001: A Space Odyssey more than anything else, especially in the first two thirds of the book. This part of the story, concerning the voyage out to Saturn and the crew interactions, makes for interesting reading, even if the final third focusing on the confrontation with the Chinese starts to drift before very long.

Sandford relied on Ctein's technical expertise to create a realistic Saturn voyage set in the late 2060s. All of the principles the pair uses for their ships' propulsion systems are known and the technological advances needed to make them completely possible. In an afterward, Sandford said he didn't want to depend on what Greg Benford calls "wantum mechanics," or the kind of jargonistic deus ex machina that's just several variations on the theme of "reversing the polarity" to haul the plot out of the fire. He succeeds, and his writing skill manages to avoid most of the techno-dumps that some authors of the genre drown in.

While Run may avoid wantum mechanics, it's rather full of wantum characterizations and wantum twists as well as a lot of dramatic setups that never really pay off. Sandford spent plenty of time getting his tech right, so knowledgeable folks won't roll their eyes at his rocket science. But they'll do it plenty at the coincidences and contrivances that litter the book, especially the last third. And these weaknesses leave Saturn Run an ultimately unsatisfying voyage.

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Peter Decker and his wife Rina are settling in to their lives in an upstate New York college town, where Peter works for a small town police department and Rina teaches part-time. The longtime Angelenos aren't sure about the winters in their new home, but the closeness to their adult children and distance from LA's hectic pace make up for it.

The discovery of a body in the woods near the end of the fall semester challenges the small department, but it seems to be a pretty clear-cut suicide. As Peter and his sometime partner, Tyler McAdams, probe the insular world of the math department where the young man was a star, they find plenty going on beneath the surface but no reason to discount the coroner's ruling of a suicide. Until a second body is found, and then it turns out that the world of higher math can have just as many devious twists and turns as any other when people start dying, in Faye Kellerman's 23rd Decker-Lazarus novel, The Theory of Death.

As is often the case with long-running series, Kellerman has found a comfortable groove with her characters. Her relocation of them to upstate New York offers some new ways to consider them and the move to a small-town setting provides several new stages on which they can perform. Rather than direct a team of detectives to investigate a crime, Peter works his own shoe leather. Used to quick responses from large nearby forensic facilities, he chafes at the delays his current bucolic locale offers. Rina herself -- Rina Lazarus when the series began but Rina Decker since entry #4, Day of Atonement -- finds herself with enough time on her hands she can accompany Peter on some of his official business. Her presence proves a great help, as does that of McAdams, in town to study before his first semester law school finals.

Much of the first half of the series turned on Peter's study of and assimilation into Judaism, Rina's faith and that of his biological parents. The second half so far has turned on the couple's seemingly irresistible urge to parent and mentor teens and young adults. Peter and Rina welcome Tyler's presence and Peter is grateful for his help, but they both are firm in their direction that he study for his law school exams. Peter also continues to guide Tyler in his work as a detective, even though the younger man may not stay with the force, and the couple also play the yenta a little for him and an eligible young woman.

Theory revolves around a lot of somewhat esoteric math, but Kellerman uses her detectives -- who have no idea what the students and professors are talking about -- as a stand-in for those readers who have no idea what the students and professors are talking about so the mathematicians can explain their fields in more lay terms. Theory manages to take its new locations, situations and cast members and put an excellent shine on a well-known series.