- Title:
- My Sweet Satan
- By:
- Peter Cawdron
- Pages:
- 260
- Rating:
- 5
The crew of the Copernicus are sent to investigate Bestla, one of the remote moons of Saturn. Bestla has always been an oddball, orbiting Saturn in the wrong direction and at a distance of thirty million kilometers, so far away Saturn appears smaller than Earth’s moon in the night sky. Bestla hides a secret. When mapped by an unmanned probe, Bestla awoke and began transmitting a message, only it’s a message no one wants to hear: “I want to live and die for you, Satan.”
We’ve had a similar idea of a space-based Human without their full memories in another one of Peter’s books. In Cold Eyes, Dali was also a younger version of himself if I remember rightly, and that lead to all sorts of interesting consequences and is another one of my favourites from this fantastic author.
Here, though, Jazz’s memories of her training are gone (hopefully not too big a spoiler – it’s revealed very early on). That opening scene on the swing was one of the most intriguing mental pictures I’ve had for a long time in a book, the juxtaposition was just brilliant and it totally compelled me to keep reading. It’s funny, having read the whole book and enjoyed it greatly, it’s still that shattering, fun-house mirror impact of that opening scene that lingers in my mind. I just know that, when I run my virtual eye down the books on my virtual shelf for a real reread, it’ll be that which leaps off the page into my head in a year or so.
SO many parallels to other great sci-fi here too, of course; 2001 and, surprisingly one of my favourite novels by another science fiction author, Golden Fleece by Robert J. Sawyer. I’m astonished that the whole of Peter’s back-catalogue of First Contact books haven’t been picked up and spread far and wide by a forward-thinking publisher yet, because they approach things so differently yet with such eloquence, forethought and insight.