Saturn

Ben Bova

Tor: New York, 2004. ISBN: 0-812-57942-9. Pp. 470

I have to admit to being a newcomer to Ben Bova, which is surprising given that I am such a sucker for vintage sci fi of the Heinlein and Asimov mold. Some regard Bova as the last "dean" of speculative fiction, and I sure hope this judgment is not based on works like Saturn. Certainly, some of the Heinlein-style anti-religious zealotry shows up here (and I understand this is an entry in a longer series of works in that alternative future history), but the politics supposedly at work in this future are, well, juvenile. The plot itself is marked by holes large enough to drive an entire habitat through, and the characters are as off-putting as they are implausible. Add to this to total lack of any discernible action and the pedestrian prose, and all you have is nearly five hundred pages of suppressed yawns.

On the surface, the plot sounds promising enough. Earth has apparently been through some rough times that probably make the post-apocalyptic future in Escape from New York sound like a pastoral idyll. Order has been restored by religious orders united under the umbrella of New Morality, an organization that sounds like the Vatican on steroids: it seems to have unified just about every major faith (Islam including, as often pointedly underscored) to create a sort of catholic (universal, not christian) theocracy. Some societies have escaped this (e.g., China), but as a rule Earth is now governed by stern religious fanatics who do not like the so-called "secularists." These would include free thinkers, perpetual contrarians, or anyone who does not like the moral code promulgated by the government.

Somehow all this stifling activity has not led to a suppression of research (odd, considering how science is implacably opposed to dogma by the virtue of the very method that depends on constant scrutiny, challenge, improvement, and reinterpretation of data). A consortium of universities has put together a huge space habitat that is supposed to carry 10,000 humans to an orbit around Saturn. The ostensible mission is to study the planet, especially one of its moons (Titan) where signs of life have been detected. From the outset, however, we are told that there is a secret and sinister-sounding secret purpose to this mission that only the leading prof knows about. (By the time this secret is revealed, we don't really care. Still, it is a major let-down after all the buildup the author tries to create. Suffice to say that I nearly threw the book when the revelation came. It's that stupid.)

Barring the somewhat strange idea of sending ten thousand people to study a planet, the whole book is really about politics. New Morality has its ring of agents on the habitat, one of whom is the chief of personnel, an annoying man by the name of Eberly. He is supposed to make sure the populace does not run wild against religious dogma and to do that he must sabotage its attempts to establish a functioning government. In this he is helped by the even more annoying fanatic Morgenthau, a murderous coward Vyborg, and a dispassionate killer/security chief Kananga. When this quartet surreptitiously insinuates itself into the political life of the habitat, they nearly succeed in setting it on the fast track to an authoritarian regime. Fortunately, it's all foiled in the end.

Where to begin? Let's start with the idea that seems so dear to many "free thinkers," namely that the Church, however defined, will be a totalitarian institution bent on achieving dominance in all spheres of one's life: public (through the government and other institutions) and private (through monitoring of morals and personal relationships). That's a nice notion that has been passed down to us by Renaissance and Enlightenment authors, but it does not stand up to a close historical scrutiny. Simply put, secular governments have been the norm (even in the middle ages the Church spent a lot of its time trying to curb their authority), and the most murderous regimes have all, without exception, been secular to boot: Nazism, Communism, Maoism, Stalinism, and garden-variety authoritarianism of the Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il mold---not a whiff of religion. Even the most barbarous and intolerant religious societies (Saudi Arabia or post-revolutionary Iran) simply pale in comparison. I am an atheist, but I have to say that instead of fretting what a theocracy can do to people's lives, the author should have thought more about what secular ideals untempered by the usual religious squeamishness about sacrificing others can wreak.

Even if we buy the author's premise that religion is the problem, we have an even deeper one with the simple fact that none of the supposed fundamentalists here are really believers. All of them, even Morgenthau, are pretty simple power-seekers who seem to use religion as a means to achieve their own ends. Perhaps this was intentional, I do not know, but it does undermine the point that the author tried to make (and try he does, or why else would we have all these other reference to the conditions on Earth). Fine, some people seek power, but then there's next truly astonishing step: as many intellectual free-thinkers, Bova seems to harbor some very deep suspicions about the common man and woman. In this view (which he, unfortunately, shares with the rather authoritarian Heinlein), people are essentially a bunch of zeroes who need someone to act as a one in front of so that they amount to more than nothing. Just consider the notion that all that Eberly has to do is sneak an "emergency powers" clause in a liberal constitution to ensure his future government. The idea is that he can then fake an emergency, suspend all those "nice" rights, and rule undisturbed as long as he wishes. Not just that, but he would be able to sneak this under the noses of several thousand of the most libertarian and contrarian minds, who will also elect him to be their leader because he can deliver nice speeches and they are really apathetic about government to be bothered to think about it deeply.

All of this amounts to a giant non sequitur: here we have, the people most averse to authority blindly voting for a constitution that has a hidden clause, who then vote for the best demagogue, who then cede unlimited powers to him out of fear, and who are content to live in subjugation as long as the government allows them to go about their mundane daily routines without great interference. And, check this out, there's no repressive apparatus (the security forces are said to be quite small and inadequate to contain large riots, for example). This is the wet dream of many intellectuals, I am sure---somehow these people never seem to imagine the "average" person to have any sense whatsoever; they always seem to think that such a person needs guidance, and invariably it is them who will offer it, the elite who conceive of themselves as simply indispensable for any mass movement. Even if we put aside the lack of common sense attributed to the mythical average person, the passivity of the population that is presumed by the author is staggering. It also cannot be true: I am not aware of any authoritarian regime that has managed to survive without extensive repression.

Another problem with the novel is that all characters, without exception, are off-putting. Some of that is a result of the function they are supposed to have in the narrative: one can hardly have a decent person act like Kananga and murder an old man simply because he's above Vyborg in the departmental hierarchy. But the rest is Bova's fault. We have the usual caricature of an ivory-tower academic in professor Wilmot, who seems oblivious to the forces around him (even though he's an anthropologist running a social experiment), who is ignorant of social dynamics, and who indulges in some decidedly x-rated S&M video fun. Worse, the scientists are so stereotypical, it hurts. They are wholly absorbed in their work, do not understand simple politics (Dr Urbain makes a PowerPoint presentation about scientific data in lieu of a rousing political speech... nobody is that dumb), are genuinely naive, offensively condescending, and arrogant beyond belief. Certainly, there are some scientists like that, but Bova has them all painted as a collective clique at odds with the rest of the populace.

Perhaps surprisingly (and here's where Bova parts with Heinlein, to his own detriment), the portrayal of women is grating on my nerves as well. They are repeatedly shown in supposedly superior positions: almost all pilots in the book are female, and some prominent scientists are women (e.g., Dr. Cardenas who's even a Nobel laureate for nanotechnology), but on the whole women are unbelievable. The central character of Holly is bizarre: she runs around like a love-sick puppy who somehow manages to stay in unrequited love with Eberly for nearly two years. As a good liberated women, this does not mean she's going to forego the occasional roll in the sack/hay, and so she fucks with abandon the stuntman Gaeta who also beds two other women in rapid succession. His machismo would have been something to talk about if it were not for the three women discovering his generosity in bestowing his sexual prowess around. What do they do? They discuss it, then they agree that it's all in good fun, and then two of them admit that they would continue sleeping with him if he asks. That's liberated. I guess. And about as impressive as a juvenile's wet dream. Heinlein degraded too by the end of his life, slipping into ever more obnoxious anti-moralizing, trying to depict incest, among other things, as being cool. Bova does not get that far. He does not even get to group sex. But he does get as close to it as he can. As a plot of a porn flick, all this makes sense. But as an exploration of interpersonal relationships between adults... I do not think so.

I would be remiss not to complain about Bova's view of how people react in emergencies. Check this out, Cardenas and Gaeta are put under house arrest even as their good friend (and Gaeta's one-time lover) Holly is on the run from the murderous authorities. Holly has made a call to Cardenas, and so she knows that her friend's life is in danger. They also know that something must be done before the political rally. Yet their way out is guarded by a couple of security men. What do the two of them do? Watch TV. Fuck. Yep, that's it. Later, after being released, what does Gaeta do? Goes to perform his stunt (jumping through one of the rings). Cardenas is consumed with worry about him. For a Nobel laureate whose friend is missing, she does not rise above the stereotypical weak woman worrying for her man, who, incidentally, seems way too self-absorbed to warrant even a passing nod. It's all surreal: in one moment the characters are all worried and in the next they seem to have forgotten their problems entirely. I wonder if Bova was aware of continuity at all.

I am not even going to bother with the condescending attitude Bova displays toward regular folk repeatedly, but suffice to say that their supposed mindless rejection of nanotechnology is just another illustration of Bova's main point: that fear can drive people to surrender reason and liberty. That's why a fake emergency could get them to give unlimited powers to their leader, and that's why they cannot tolerate nano-research. It all makes for a good headline but since it is neither borne by historical experience nor seems to be particularly justified by the environment depicted in the book, it all remains quite unsatisfactory as speculative fiction. At 470 pages, the novel is too long to sustain dramatic tension and since the annoying characters never change (or become remotely likeable, it makes for a boring read.

January 15, 2006