"Project Jove" is a 1971 science-fiction novel by John Glasby, published as one half of an Ace Double, with the other side being The Hunters of Jundagai by Kenneth Bulmer. It is a mostly hard science-fiction novel, set in the near future. This is apparently the only novel that Glasby published with Ace, although he wrote many books in different genres, including science-fiction, Western and other adventure stories.
Sometime in the near future, scientists have build a base on the surface of Jupiter---which, in the book, is frozen ice under thousands of miles of methane and ammonia to research strange physical phenemena. Since the conditions are too extreme, the base is staffed by robots, while the human scientists live on Io. At the beginning of the book, a skeptical senator from earth wants to investigate the base. While doing so, his ship crash lands, and he, along with two scientists, is trapped in the shifting ice. At the same time, a scientist named Norbert Donner investigates the base to find the robots (more precisely, androids acting strangely, while the director of the project tries to find the damaged ship. The action switches between the three settings as Jupiter's atmosphere and the rebellious robots endanger everyone. In the final 10 pages of the book, we are treated with a hasty conclusion: the base was working on an application of Georg Cantor's mathematics that will allow travel beyond the solar system to the stars. After 130 pages of slinking around on the surface of Jupiter, in the final ten pages of the book, we travel to Tau Ceti.
This book had an interesting plot, and a novel setting, but the problem was that the characters and situation were introduced too quickly for me to feel any connection to the characters. If this was a movie, I might have had an easier time keeping track of who was who, but the characters came across as cardboard, especially the one female character, who is described as "less hysterical than other women". Perhaps I wasn't paying enough attention, but even while I could understand the plot, the characters were interchangable to me.
Also of interest to me is that this book reminded me of two things that are unusual about it, compared to much of the 1960s science-fiction I have been reading (and not just in Ace Doubles): exploration of the immediate solar system, and the presence of robots or androids, which are both present in this book, are not common themes of the 1960s. The first probably because the realistic nature of confined spaces and limited movement are less exciting than interstellar empires, and the second is a more puzzling omission. The inclusion of both of them makes this book interesting, and it is too bad that the storytelling and characterization weren't a little better.