Rating: WARTY!
If you want to know what five hundred pages of pure crap looks like, then this is definitely the book for you. Saturn Run Off at the Mouth would have been a more apt title. Eric Conger's reading of it in the audio version also was not entertaining. As a result, I'm done reading anything by either of these authors ever again. This is my first and last.
This was a long, long novel in which literally nothing happened. If you love authors who are so obsessed with parading their technical chops - even when it's complete fictional horseshit - then you'll love this. But it was way the hell too Clancy for me. If they had cut all of that out, and reduced the length of the book to about two hundred pages - the last two hundred - then I might have merely considered it to be garbage, but I sure would have appreciated the trees they saved (or in this case petroleum products since this was on CD).
The premise is that in 2066, a spacecraft is observed (by accident) entering orbit around one of Saturn's moons, and two rival spacecraft from Earth (one Chinese, one American primitive as they are), are dispatched to rendezvous with it. It leaves before they get there, but the moon it orbited turns out to be an automated space station and a technology goldmine. This lethargic approach to the story was the problem for me. It was some fifty chapters before they ever arrived at Saturn's moon, and when they did the aliens were gone! So what, exactly, was the point of the story? That people are greedy, mercenary, and untrustworthy? We already knew that.
This was boring and I started skipping tacks very early. It got to the point of skipping whole sections just to see, out of pure curiosity, if they ever would arrive at Saturn. They did, but then the story was nothing but a Chinese stand-off, with no one apparently questioning the divine right of humans to pillage the property of others whenever they feel like it. It sucked.
