Sean Williams, Saturn Returns

Saturn Returns

Sean Williams

Ace, May 2007, $7.99, 336 pp.

ISBN 0441014933

In the very distant future, a person wakes up on a ship with no memory and his rescuer the Jinc, a gestalt mind with its people all part of that mind. They find him floating in space before he was vaporized by nukes, and they have put him back together. One of the only mistakes is they made him a woman, when Imre Bergamasc was always a man. When he fails to remember information they want from him, they want to absorb in their gestalt. A mysterious voice abets his escape by opening up a ship closed tothe jinc.

Imre learns that the Continuum is destroyed, the worlds no longer looped together. He finds that the next step in humanity's evolution is no more, and communicating on the Line is gone. The Slow Wave was responsible for all this, yet nobody knows if it was a man made weapon. Imre meets up with his former members of the corps, and they soon start working together. It seems there is a connection between the Slow Wave and Imre's murder, and finding it will tell them what direction their lives should take, if they are able to gather reliable information without getting killed by their enemies.

Sean Williams entertains his readers with a bleak and dark future, of which the tragedy is that the galaxy was once golden. Imre is the star, focus, and the man with the answer, although between his amnesia and the fact that he is a Singleton makes it difficult to put the pieces of his memory back together. Mates of the hero are spread throughout the universe slowly, but find themselves reaching out to the members of the Corp from clues they left behind. This is space opera at its very best, with its exciting scenes and the descriptions of a puzzle that destroyed the structure of the known universe. Readers will like Imre, a combination of a hard and vulnerable person who needs to find out what he has done to change the known universe.