Saturn Returns is book one of Sean Williams‘ space opera trilogy Astropolis, and it’s an intriguing and promising, if occasionally confusing, start which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award. For me, the term ‘space opera’ evokes the works of Peter F. Hamilton, Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds, and Williams has much in common with these great writers, underpinned by an impressive breadth of vision. Moral ambiguity, compromise and uncertainty abound in a universe beset by internecine strife and technological reversals.

The Continuum is in decline – it was the peak of human civilisation, an interconnected galactic milieu reminiscent of Banks’ Culture universe. Populated by a range of different flavours of humanity – gestalt entities, singletons (who, perversely, can exist as multiple independent copies rather like the central characters of Reynolds’ House of Suns), and Primes, humans who have been around since our own times – the universe was run and orchestrated by the Forts, super-powerful gestalt entities operating like human equivalents of giant distributed computer networks. Now the Forts have been attacked by the Slow Wave, some kind of information bomb, and the old galactic order is crumbling.

In to this situation awakes Imre Bergemasc – he has been reconstructed from genetic data by a gestalt entity patrolling the edge of the universe, and has a swiss-cheese memory to contend with, as well as the fact that the Jinc have brought him back as a woman. Saturn Returns is the story of Bergemasc’s journey of discovery back in to the universe, and back through his own patchy memories. He knows he was a mercenary, leader of the Corps, first fighting at the behest of the Forts, and then fighting against them; he has memories of his mercenary command team, but beyond that he’s in the dark about many things. What he will discover is a convoluted conspiracy, with multiple factions , some of which seem to be determined to prevent any reconstruction of a galactic order, while the goals of others are more shadowy. As he finds his Corps colleagues and makes the transition back to being male, he has to contend with the prospect that there may be other copies of himself trying to kill them, and work out just what the hell is going on.

The book reaches a breathless climax when Bergemasc and his team, riven by internal tensions, rescue the last of their number, a Prime called Render, from a terrifying prison moon. Bergemasc realises he still has much to do to work out just what has happened to him, much less what is going on now – who are the Luminous? Who are the Barons? Whose side is he on? Why does Render only talk using Gary Numan lyrics? (OK, so that last one is not high on Bergemasc’s list, but Render does only talk in Gary Numan lyrics!). There were times when I found events in Saturn Returns as confusing as Bergemasc himself seems to, but it’s intriguing and, unusually for the genre, not overlong. I look forward to reading the next volume, Earth Ascendant.

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