What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
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Neptunus
SOLVED: Adult Fiction
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SOLVED. Scifi Thriller / 2001 / An international mission to neptune? is known to have a terrorist saboteur among its crew and a detective is added to the crew in the hope of stopping them. [s]
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Thanks for thinking along. :-)Unfortunately, the book I am thinking of is not among those listed there.
I am 99% sure it was a standalone novel, and about 50% confident that the novel was named after the spaceship of the story.
The book has been identified because of a random comment offered by a friend who suggested it might be a Dutch book by a Dutch novelist. Woo!I had not considered this since I read mostly english novels, and the plot itself (non-dutch lead, dutch villain) seemed very unintuitive compared to the reverse where the lead matches ones own nationality.
The book was 'Neptunus' by Johan Klein Haneveld, originally released in 2001, and later re-released in 2013.
See: https://www.goodreads.com/work/editio...
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Authorities know one of the planned crew members is a saboteur due to an existing struggle against a terrorist organisation who has set its eyes on the mission, but despite exhaustive investigation, they were not able to identify who this person is..
To preserve and protect the crew, a detective who happened to have space training at one point in his life is requested to join the mission and stop them. He becomes the vice commander which leaves the crew upset since in their eyes he is unfit for the job of leading them who have trained for many years to go on the mission.
There is some form of cryosleep during the journey. The total length to go there and back will take several years. The engine has three propulsion units for redundancy in case of problems.
The commander and some others of the crew die early on due to the anti-meteorite defenses having been disabled.
I think the technician (French male iirc?) ended up barely surviving but mostly paralyzed. Despite trying very hard as one of few remaining able-bodied individuals who has the mental support of the technician, they are unable to figure out why the system is not working after breaking everything.
They end up missing the last window that will allow them to return back home with regards to the food/water/energy reserves that got severely crippled during the accident.
The biologist (Dutch woman, iirc) ended up being the culprit.
Happy ending: they end up finding a way home by activating all the redundancy engines at the same time, increasing their speed and lessening the time it would to get home. (At the cost of being more likely to hit meteorites, but at that point, the increase of that small chance is something nobody cares about anymore.)
Thank you for thinking along; the origins of this book I read as a kid has been bugging me for the longest time.