Savage Planet

February 24, 2014
Coonts belatedly concludes his lackluster Saucer trilogy (following 2003’s Saucer and 2006’s Saucer: The Conquest) with a burst of unlikely fireworks and a thud. Doughty engineering student Rip Cantrell discovered a flying saucer in the Sahara desert, aided by lovely former Air Force test pilot Charlotte Pine and Rip’s brilliant inventor uncle, Arthur “Egg” Cantrell. A year later, the team is called in to study another saucer embedded in the Great Barrier Reef. Meanwhile, pharma mogul Harrison Douglas has retrieved the Roswell spaceship, which was stolen from Area 51. When Douglas’s saucer expert, Adam Solo, steals the spaceship, Douglas vows revenge. Solo allies with Rip and his friends, revealing he is an alien marooned on Earth for over a thousand years, and he uses Rip’s Sahara spaceship, to call for help, but they’ll all need to hide from U.S. government agents and Harrison until rescue arrives in one week’s time. Tissue-thin characters and heavy-handed plotting make this forgettable story one of Coonts’s less successful outings.

April 1, 2014
The third in the Saucer series is, like its predecessors, science fiction in the grand pulp tradition. It's been a decade since Coonts' last entry in the series (Saucer: The Conquest, 2004), but the story picks up pretty much where that one left off. The alien flying saucer that landed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, is now sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Harrison Douglas is about to recover the saucer, determined to extract from its computers the formula for an anti-aging drug. But he hasn't counted on his right-hand man, Adam Solo, stealing the saucer. Turns out Solo is a space traveler, and he wants to use the Roswell saucer to summon a starship to take him home. Make no mistake, this isn't intended to be serious science fiction. It's pulp fiction, a story that feels like it came off the pages of a 1940s or '50s sf magazine, with deliberately dubious science, flashy characters, and a whole lot of fun. It's the kind of story you read and think: Why don't they write stuff like this anymore?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)