Titan

NASA Trilogy #2

by Stephen Baxter

2004 : les analyses de la sonde Cassini-Huygens sur la composition de la surface de Titan, l'une des lunes satellites de Saturne, révèlent que toutes les conditions atmosphériques et chimiques permettant l'existence d'une vie organique y sont rassemblées.

Motivée par les spectaculaires découvertes qui pourraient en découler, une équipe de la NASA met au point le projet d'un vol habité vers ce lieu potentiel d'existence extraterrestre. Pendant plusieurs années, ces astronautes, ingénieurs et scientifiques vont se heurter aux volontés contraires de l'armée, s'opposer aux coupes budgétaires stratégiques d'une bureaucratie frileuse et lutter contre le reniement par le gouvernement des ambitions spatiales du passé, pour imposer le lancement d'une mission vers Titan. Mission qui, au-delà des temps et des dimensions, les conduira aux limites du savoir humain...

Après Voyage, Stephen Baxter poursuit son entreprise de réécriture des grandes aventures spatiales américaines de notre temps. A partir d'un événement concret (l'arrivée — réelle — de la sonde en 2004), il imagine ce que pourraient être aujourd'hui l'élaboration et la mise en application d'un projet spatial de la NASA de grande ampleur et aux formidables enjeux.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space, Alternate History, Science Fiction Fantasy, Hard Science Fiction, Audiobook

700 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Stephen Baxter is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge (mathematics) and Southampton Universities (doctorate in aeroengineering research). Baxter is the winner of the British Science Fiction Award and the Locus Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award, most recently for Manifold: Time. His novel Voyage won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel of the Year; he also won the John W. Campbell Award and the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel The Time Ships. He is currently working on his next novel, a collaboration with Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Mr. Baxter lives in Prestwood, England.

Reviews

[Nick Borrelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this one a lot but I usually enjoy Baxter's books. Titan is the second book in the NASA trilogy (Voyage being book 1 and Moonseed being book 3). A great story about finding signs of life on Saturn's largest moon Titan. We are treated to a bunch of fascinating science, which is per usual as Baxter likes to show his technical and scientific knowledge quite regularly in his writing. The entire trip to Titan was well done and then what happens once the team lands is worth the read in and of itself. I don't agree with people who say that Baxter's prose is dry and that he has a hard time with characterization. I have been enthralled with every book that I have read by him and consider him one of the best hard sci-fi writers up there with Vernor Vinge and Gregory Benford. My only criticism is there were a couple of times when it was a little slow-going but other than that, I loved it. On to the next Stephen Baxter book!

[Phil · Rating 1 out of 5]

I have read many of Baxter's novels, and this by far was the worst one I have come across; in fact, it was a real struggle to finish it at all. Baxter always has big ideas and incorporates science in a very thoughtful way, but he tried to do way too much here. Published in 1997, Titan was set in a grim near future circa 2004, but in many ways, it reads now like an alternative history. The Cassini space probe had just reached Saturn and began mapping out the moons, even landing a probe on Titan. The results that came back suggested that there might be life on Titan, and Rosenburg, one of our leads, started dreaming of a way to send people there to investigate. Rosenburg works at JPL and has contacts at NASA. Unfortunately, a new president will be elected in 2008 and he is rabidly against the space program unless it has a military edge. Before he gets elected, Rosenburg, along with help from Paula, our other lead, put together a team to plan a manned mission to Titan, one to launch before the new president comes into power. Refurbishing old space rockets and habitats, they cobble together a ship that will take six years to reach Titan with a crew of five, Paula and Rosenburg included.

Not content with just imagining such a feat like a mission to Titan Baxter also gives us a gloomy dystopia of America, with the president basically abolishing science, forcing teachers to replace it with biblical stories of creation in schools, and so forth. The problem here is that Baxter envisions way to much change in such a short period of time. I mean, he wrote the book in the mid 1990s, and the vast changes he portrays in America just a decade later are totally off the wall. People with 'softscreen tattoos', or tattoos that make one invisible; people moving to Central America to return to their hunter/gathering roots; climate change so rapid that the Ozone layer is gone by 2008, fully immersive virtual reality, etc., etc., etc. Along with this back drop, the doomed mission to Titan continues, even as NASA is basically shut down and no resupply mission is even on the books. The USA is involved with a hot war with China which will shortly render the world uninhabitable to humanity...

If Baxter would have simply tried to entertain us with a implausible but possible voyage to Titan utilizing old Space Shuttle tech grafted to Saturn rockets, I could have gone along. Trying to give us a near dystopia of the collapse of civilization was just too much. I am not sure what his goal here was, but it definitely did not work for me. I ended up skimming much of the last 200 pages just to see where it would go, and was rewarded with an ending that was, frankly, silly. I would definitely not recommend this to anyone, especially someone interested in Baxter's works, as it would surely turn them away from ever reading a Baxter novel again. 1.5 stars.

[Lis Carey · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the story of a manned trip to Titan in the early years of the 21st century, from the same writer that gave us the somewhat depressing, but grippingly realistic and compelling Voyage.

Where shall I start? With the bioengineered anthrax that only attacks Han Chinese? With the ammonia-based beings who manage to revive Our Heroes four billion years after their deaths, with their memories intact?

No.

I'll start with a U.S. Air Force pilot, acting on orders of an Air Force general, attempting to shoot down Endeavor as it takes Our Heroes into orbit to board Discovery and begin the trip to Titan. Not only is nobody court-martialed for this; the effect is to sour the sheeplike public's brief enthusiasm for NASA. It produces no bad effects for the Air Force whatsoever, and only minimally impedes the career of the pilot involved.

There's an impressively lifeless caricature of a right-wing, militaristic, super-patriot politician, whose election we're supposed to believe was inevitable nearly four years out. (When, exactly, was the last time that the "obvious front-runner" immediately after one presidential election was even his party's nominee in the next election? When was the last time one of these "obvious front-runners" was elected in the following election?) He is not given any attractive features whatsoever, and all the characters, both for and against him, treat him like a force of nature. Everyone seems to be terrified of him; no one seems to consider simply voting against him. No other candidates are so much as mentioned. Not even the possibility of other candidates is mentioned.

One character, Jake Hadamard, makes casual reference to "the extension of the Communications Decency Act", which completely shut down the internet until, somewhat later in the book, it is reopened under extremely tight censorship. The shutdown and censored reopening of the net is significant for the background of the book, and it's treated explicitly as an extension of currently-existing law. Now, it might be unfair to expect Baxter to have incorporated the fact of the Supreme Court's June 1997 decision striking down the CDA [his afterword is dated January 1997], but the lower court decision against it was in 1996. Still cutting things unfairly close? Not fair to expect him to incorporate 1996 material in a book turned in no later than January 1997? Well, remember, we're talking about the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It only required minimal attention to what was going on in the country he was writing about to note that the CDA was in trouble almost immediately upon passage and unlikely to survive, and only a few lines needed to be rewritten to attribute the post-2000 shutdown of the internet to some post-1996 law.

The right-wing caricature referred to above, Xavier MacLachlan, gets elected on schedule in 2008. He's a super-patriot, as mentioned above. One of his earliest actions, one year after the launch of the Titan mission [which can't get back on its own; it has to wait for pick-up], is to shut down not only the retrieval mission plans, but also the unmanned resupply launches. This is a popular decision because, of course, Americans are now bored with the Titan mission. Can I have a show of hands on who thinks either the decision or the popular reception of it is plausible? Remember, we're talking about deliberately abandoning five American astronauts in deep space, while they're still transmitting both sound and pictures.

Even though MacLachlan was so popular that his election was inevitable, almost immediately after he takes office parts of the US start seceding. There are some border skirmishes, but no real effort to prevent the secessions. MacLachlan and crew are far too busy, building up the US military in order to confront America's enemies, the Red Chinese, to waste time on secessionists...Uh-huh. Right.

It's not that MacLachlan is a bad guy. It's not that he's a right-wing bad guy. It's not that he's a stupid right-wing bad guy. If that were well done, I'd enjoy it. It's that he's stupid about everything, in wildly implausible ways. It's that he does the stupid or evil thing even when blindly following the hard-right ideology that he is supposed to be completely devoted to would lead him to do something at least different, and probably much smarter. Hard-right ideologues, having gained control of Washington, are not going to be happily indifferent to various pieces of the USA deciding to secede. That's a potential left-wing idiocy, not a right-wing one. MacLachlan's xenophobia is one of his plausible right-wing idiocies; this indifference to secession isn't. It's as if Baxter knows nothing about American politics except that the American political right is Bad Bad Bad. And yet this is not the impression I had after reading Voyage, where the politics seemed depressingly realistic. It's as if Baxter forgot everything that he knew then, and tried to fill the gap by reading the British tabloids' accounts of American politics and popular culture.

In 2012, the Chinese decide that the USA is no longer a major threat, and they attack Taiwan. The US responds (in fact, the secession-fragmented former USA makes a unified, fully integrated military response), there's a war, the Americans are sneakier than the Chinese and have better technology; the Americans win. I had the nagging feeling all through this that something was missing. I finally pinned it down. Japan. The Chinese invade a large offshore island that they claim is historically theres, and no one even mentions the possibility that the Japanese might perhaps express an opinion on the matter. Japan is completely irrelevant to this confrontation. Sure thing.

It seems almost petty to complain about the Chinese being dumb enough to pull the stunt with the asteroid, or to miscalculate and use one that's too big, or to not notice the danger of miscalculating the trajectory. I'm certain it's petty to complain about a portrait of Generation X that identifies as one of its more productive members a young man who produces "art" by gnawing dried shit with his teeth. It would be petty beyond belief to point out that we're told that this is his only skill immediately after he's produced an excellent dinner for eight. Only the small-minded would deign to notice that the noble ammonia-beings of Titan, who decide as their world is about to be destroyed by the still-expanding sun to seed the planets of other stars with both Earth life and Titan life--unlike ignoble humans, who just destroyed everything--almost certainly got the idea from the last two survivors of the Titan mission, who deliberately seeded a water-ice lake with all the organic material from Earth that they had.

I could go on much longer, but why bother? Ignore this one, and hope that Baxter gets back to writing far-future stories.

[Devon · Rating 1 out of 5]

Flying to Saturn on chemical rockets...technically possible if you can find a crew willing to sit in a cramped cabin for 6 years or so, and Baxter does a good job of explaining just how it would get done. But even Baxter can't make it believable that we would actually go do it.

The single-election-cycle takeover of American society by a Taliban-esque religious right is lame. It's one-dimensional, lazy, ignorant and unbelievable. He gets important details of American government factually wrong, and though he may be British, Baxter should not be excused from basic research in what is a key plot element. It is as if he did his research out of British tabloids.

The BIG event (you'll know it when you get to it) is just stupid. Nobody with the technological capability to pull it off would be capable of such a gross miscalculation. It's like inventing a laser cannon and then not understanding which end you're looking into when you fire it into your face. It's Loony Tunes stuff, and it is THE BIG EVENT around which Baxter's book revolves.

[Peter Pier · Rating 5 out of 5]

It´s... strange.
You´ll have to read first. But it has something to learn from- and it teaches. About the endurance of life. Simply read.

[Anthoney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baxter, I feel is a visionary, in the way that he builds his stories not in years or even centuries but the stories extends in eras and eons, astronomical timelines, at least the ones I have read including Evolution & Xeelee stories. While of course the writing is dry and made all the more drier by the hard science and technical details, it is those very scientific reference and details make such implausible plots seem possible, and concepts awe inspiring unlike some other grand space operas that I have not cared to read which presumably use it only as frame or props. And details he does get into this book, very richly. Right from rocket / space shuttle mechanics, launch & landing protocols, interplanetary space travel, bio chemistry, extra terrestrial life forms and even their bio mechanics !! I am not sure what is a serendipity here, discovering the science with the thrill of an action fantasy, or reading science and then realizing that it is a fiction with decent action.

Some parts and details do get tedious and I had to skim through these, like for e.g the characters trek on Titan for further exploration and survival, every topography and feature described... editing these could have saved some pages or quite a lot. But the climax is the pay off. Stunning and marvellous.

PS: The Kindle reproduction has some many horrendous spelling errors leading to lot of annoyance, for some reason letter 'f' is replaced by letter 't' One jarring example "Shadows shitted steadily" Lolz

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I desperately want to give this book five stars: it has detailed accounts of how a manned trip to Saturn might take place in the present day, and how life on Titan might actually work day to day. All of this is done in a very readable format. However, there are some huge problems countering these.

1) The plan is to go to Titan and essentially set up a human colony there. So they send five people in a small rocket on a trip of several years. Obviously such a small space would send everyone on board crazy. And if you're setting up a colony, you obviously need to send more than five people. You need a large living space with a few dozen people at least. Moreover, to set up a colony you need people willing and able to reproduce the human race. The five people he sends are two men and three women. One of the men is an asshole and the other is a complete geek; in other words, the two types of men least attractive to the female gender. The three women are a post-menopausal woman, and two lesbians in a committed relationship. So before they even go, you know that there's no chance of the Titan colony lasting longer than these five can live.

2) Baxter's hysterical fear of all things Christian is comical. He apparently saw a televangelist once and assumes that's a faithful representation of 2,000 years of Christian thought and reflection. You have to read it to believe it. Tied to this is a complete ignorance of the history of science. It's hard to make yourself this ignorant while being so knowledgeable of science.

3) Baxter has apparently confused the United States Presidency with a kingship. A new president is elected (an evil anti-science Christian of course), and immediately starts doing all sorts of radical things that would require acts of Congress in the real world, and would almost certainly not be done at any rate.

[Paul McFadyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Serious. Very serious. As plausible a book I've read about near-future space exploration, with a decent stab at second-guessing our species' behaviour on THIS planet over the next few years.

Whilst it's ultimately positive about mankind's ability to adapt to and occupy different environments (trying not to throw in any obvious spoilers here), it definitely takes some pretty blooming bleak routes to get there - this is not a book I'd recommend to anyone suffering any kind of existential crisis.

If you can live with that though (and the author's obsession with the concept of the "soft screen" computer - which I picture as something akin to a souped-up iPad on a teatowel - both here and in half his other books), there's much to enjoy about this book and his other near-future works ("Space", "Time").

[Baal Of · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard science-fiction with an emphasis on highly detailed descriptions of launch capability, rockets, shuttles, procedures, life support systems, and a myriad of other things necessary to survive a prolong space flight. Many pages dedicated to dealing with shit and piss in space. Baxter might be a little bit obsessed. The good - a fairly plausible (with a few major exceptions) series of events leading to the sending of 5 astronauts on a 6 year trip to Titan - the launch occurs around 250 pages into the book, so this is not a fast moving adventure. The descriptions of Titan itself are interesting, as well as the survival aspects. The far-right-wing extremist presidential candidate is scary, because everything he says, could have been said by real politicians acting today. It's almost like he just stole the rhetoric right out of current news.
The bad - a conspiracy to shoot down the Titan launch by the US Air Force has pretty much no consequences for those who were involved. Baxter's inability to write dialog in a lot of situations was glaringly obvious. Two of the characters - lesbian lovers who were part of the Titan crew, were never actually depicted speaking to each other. It was always an external narrator describing their internal thoughts about the other. Wasted opportunity for better character development. Then he killed both of them off leaving us with the asshole male pilot.
And finally - the resurrection of the final two characters (why not the 2 others who were also dead on Titan?) with their memories didn't make sense in this book that otherwise stuck with reasonably hard science. There was no plausible mechanism to show how their memories and personalities could have been preserved.
Overall a decent, if rather slow and depressing, story about an attempt to reach other worlds, but if you want any solid character development, walk on by.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great critique of the modern space program, as well as the modern attitude (politcal and intellectual) towards the hard sciences and engineering. So great that it really opens your eyes on certain things that Baxter argues are happening in this world right now.

Great concept, great story. Definitely a much broader epic than I was initially expecting when I picked this book up. However, the ending was a little strange and the book in its entirety seemed to drag at times. Great read though, definitely reccomend it.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite a book. Not only quite big at 580 pages but a big concept. In some ways it's like his earlier book 'Voyage', profiling a prospective trip to Mars with all its politics and logistical wrangling. Titan is similar. 2 thirds of the book are about dealings with NASA and the USAF, and then a mission profile to Titan is begun. Eventually we get there. And when Baxter takes us somewhere we really know about it! Good stuff.

[Brian Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ok, I was looking forward to this, I'd enjoyed the stories written with Terry Pratchett.
However, I was disappointed. I listened to the audio, which has very poor reviews on Audible, but honestly, I didn't mind it; a few mispronunciations, but nothing serious.

There was a major plot hole; however, if it were possible that life was detected on Titan, there is no possibility that a crewed mission would be sent to exploit the pristine environment as a base of operations to explore the outer system. Sorry, but there is just no way that would have been done.
There's also a 13-year round trip in little more than a space shuttle, with no gravity.
The hard science was well researched, which makes the plot holes more difficult to understand.

The story hasn't aged well; in some respects, the predictions are very prescient, but in other respects, they are so far off that it detracts from the narrative. I'm reviewing this in 2025; the book was written in 1997, not that long ago, but the world is almost not recognisable.

If you are looking for a fun read, this book isn't it - I was 10% angry, 90% depressed.

I finished it because I was interested, I wanted to see how it all worked out. No characters were worth rooting for; they were all dysfunctional.
As for the ending, well, I'm reminded of the famous line from Red Dwarf, "Every bodies dead, Dave!"

I always want to focus on the positives. The story was fast-paced, with plenty of action. Well written, and the ending surprised me, which was interesting. It's not the way I would have written this story.
Sorry, Stephen, but this just didn't work.

[Micah Lawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll go ahead and admit it right now: I skipped through most of the beginning of this book, finding the political intrigue on Earth tedious and boring. I wanted to get into the Titan stuff as fast as possible.

I'll give Baxter this: he's done his research, and I was continually impressed with his descriptions of a possible voyage to Titan and what landing and exploring this alien world might be like. Ultimately, I found myself feeling oppressed and a bit depressed by the futility of life on Titan for the intrepid astronauts who survived the voyage and managed to eke out an existence there.

The final chapter or two are the weirdest part of the book (no spoilers here), and while I appreciated seeing what Titan might be like a few hundred million years in the future, the whole thing ultimately felt empty and meaningless to me.

The final message of the book: life will go on, somehow, somewhere, though in strange and entirely unknown forms. And maybe that's a message of hope for some. For me, somehow, I was looking for more.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

This dystopian space tale was out of date shortly after it was published, but it's still a good story with an important message - space travel is bigger than short-term interests, and politics will always nuke expensive programs. The Apollo moon landings were a freak, needed to put the commies in their place, so to speak.

In the early 21st century, the dying days of the space program are in sight. The possibility of life is discovered on Titan, one of Saturns moons. A new NASA director gets the idea to sneak in a mission to Titan before the space program is dismantled by the incoming president. (I found this one a little hard to swallow - how often is is a presidential race years in the future that certain?)

The scope of the novel is expansive, focusing on world affairs for much of it, and progressing to humanity's future in the universe. I enjoyed it, and am reading Mr. Baxter's novel The Time Ships, picked up on the strength of this book.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt a special affinity for this book. It was written in 1997 (the year of Cassini's launch) and Cassini's mission has a large part to play. Having worked on the Cassini mission at JPL, I could tell the author had been to JPL doing extensive research. His description of the facility and mission were spot-on. It was fun to read of his characters walking through the very building and floor where I was working at the time of the characters' visit. His descriptions of the results of the Cassini mission were very accurate (written 7 years before the events).

The story was unexpectedly dystopian but that gave the characters' mission more urgency. The author has a real knack for describing worlds as seen from space even if some metaphors gave me pause.

The descriptions of living in space and other hostile environments compares very will to "The Martian" (written much later). Very detailed and technical.

[D.G. Post · Rating 4 out of 5]

The word that comes to mind is “impressive”. Not so much because of the characters, or even the plot; viewed solely on the merits of those, I’d have to give fewer stars, as the characters were not memorable (I genuinely don’t remember much about them) and the story slowed to a crawl a times. But the tension! The detail! The sense of what it must feel like to actually be in space! This is probably the closest I’ve come to being able to imagine what astronauts go through. Baxter really must have done a lot of research. Also, I loved the ending; it made me see this author in a whole new light. I won’t say any more than that.

[George Ruddell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book over a long period. I covered the first 350 pages, set it aside and then cane back to it. It was well worth finishing. Some interesting twists at the end.

[Bookworm · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: C

What a long book.

Humanity sends an expedition to Saturn to investigate life on the moon, Titan. Unfortunately, it will take about 6 years to get there, and the expedition is likely going to be one way. In the meantime, the politics of the USA are changing and a new, religious president is in power. He removes support of space-faring programs within the USA, leaving the crew of the Titan-bound ship abandoned.

This book was certainly interesting. There were some typos in the book, which, I mean given that it was 1995, I guess can be reasonable. I kind of hoped that there was more focus on the space stuff vs the politics on Earth. They were such a drag and definitely made the book longer. I found them very tiring and repetitive. Plus there was a lot of suspect content in this book - it's like the hallmark of a man writing a book with female characters in it.

- There has to be a scene where a woman is sexually assaulted almost.
- There has to be a scene where two characters who hate each other have sex.
- There is a scene where two women are talking and one says to the other, "Good girl", when a sequence is followed correctly.

She felt her sense of place and time shift around her. It was as if the landscape of Titan was reaching her, through the isolating layers of her suit; she started to get a sense that she was truly here, alive and sentient, on this ethane lake, a billion miles from her birthplace.

"How can I die? How can the world keep turning without me? I'm unique, Paula. The centre of the universe. The one true sentient individual in an ocean of shapes and noises and faces. How can I die? It's a cruel joke

[Mihai · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was interesting reading this book 20 years after it was written and noting the differences between its version of alternate history and how time (as we understand it) has actually progressed since. The most important divergence of course is that humanity has yet to send a manned mission to Titan - or anywhere else in the Solar System for that matter. We haven't even been able to return to our closest neighbor, the Moon, and soon we'll be coming up on 60 years since the glory days of space exploration. With those sad facts in mind, the progression of events and the accelerated timeline of Titan now seem laughable, even ridiculous. Stephen Baxter imagines an unlikely though ambitious future in a sprawling novel, with an uneven story that starts out bogged down by technical details and boring power struggles on Earth, and finishes with wild speculations about the survival of life in the known universe.

I picked up the book as my interest in Saturn's largest moon was revived after major discoveries based on observations from the Cassini probe currently in orbit around the gas giant were announced. For example, just in 2016, the highest mountains on the planet were identified, a methane sea was explored and scientists on Earth uncovered a chemical trail that may be key to prebiotic conditions. These are things that Baxter couldn't have anticipated when Titan was written, but many of his speculations about what the first human crew encounters upon landing are scientifically plausible and may as yet be supported by empirical evidence once a probe gets to explore Titan's surface.

The novel itself is a long slog, first through the politics of NASA and the modern bureaucracy of space exploration, with nostalgic shoutouts to the days of the Apollo and early orbital missions. A large cast of characters is introduced, many of whom become irrelevant by the end. Keeping track of all the individuals along with explanations of various technological developments was tedious to say the least, and I found it difficult to stay engaged with the book.

The basic premise of the first half of the book is that the costly Space Shuttle program is dealt a deathblow with the destruction of an orbiter, which in turn leads to the government to pull the plug on NASA and the entire space program. As a science-adverse President takes over and the world descends into conflict, a manned mission is launched to Titan - the last American hurrah. However, as the space program is dismantled or reoriented toward fighting other humans, the Titan mission is abandoned to its own fate, which is not kind. While I didn't care much for the tired trope of humanity destroying itself and the planet, it was eerie to contemplate a few things that Baxter did get right, such as the destruction of Columbia Space Shuttle upon re-entry (2003), the tight-fisted administration of a conservative President (Bush 2000-2008), and the rise of China as a global superpower (though not to the extent described here). As the book was published just before the launch of the Cassini-Huygens mission in 1997, it was also interesting to compare how Baxter anticipated its findings, which have kept coming since arrival in the Saturnian system in 2004.

Once the mission got under the way, the story in Titan improved. I found the seven-year journey to Saturn captivating, despite the dreariness of the main characters being locked up in confined spaces with each other, and the challenges they faced along the way, including a tragedy. Then, as the ship reaches Titan and completes a successful final landing, the constant struggles of the survivors in an alien and hostile environment, abandoned by their own kind a billion miles away without any hope of rescue, were gripping. Unfortunately, the side story of what happens back on Earth, culminating with the Chinese directing an asteroid to crash into the planet and thus destroying the planet, is just a silly distraction and could be done without. As the humans on Titan become the last representatives of our species, it falls onto them to somehow keep life going even after they physically expire. Thus an ending of bold ideas, that deals with a future billions of years ahead, when the astronomical setup that we are used finally ceases to exist.

Titan is not a bad book, but it's not a great one either. It is definitely too long at 400+ pages, with a detailed geeky exposition that gets insipid, yet it is worth following to the end for the imaginative treatment of what the first human mission to Titan could uncover on the surface of Saturn's cold moon.

[Alejandro Contreras · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in the beginning of the 21st century, the book tells the story of a NASA led expedition to Titan. With almost 700 pages, and contrary to typical Baxter style of eons-long stories, this is a long book for a relatively simple endeavor. This implies that Baxter gets into lots of details before, during and after the trip to Titan. For my taste, the book’s beginning is quite slow and boring. The preparations for the trip take forever, and even though I respect his technical expertise, it seems to me he went overboard with them.
Surprisingly, the book eventually takes off and gets interesting. The final chapters really are a surprise and remind us why Baxter is such a great sci-fi writer.
Some people criticize some political and geopolitical events, as simplistic and unrealistic. I kind of agree, but somehow that is part of what makes science fiction interesting. If you’re looking for realism, perhaps sci-fi is not for you.

In all, I give Titan a 4. The beginning is a 3, but the middle and the end of the book tend to be almost a 5. So a 4 seems fair.

[Brent Werness · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected this book to be much more like "Voyage" (the first book in Baxter's NASA series) however it was quite different. The first book was, in my opinion, a very accurate rendition of an alternate history where NASA goes to Mars rather than build the space shuttle, this book was more of a caricature of a possible future for NASA viewed from 1997. I still enjoyed it, but I found a lot of it just too far fetched to really work well as a story.

First, I want to start out with a comment that no one else seems to have made about this book. It starts with a shuttle disaster involving Columbia in 2004 (whereas in the real world the Columbia disaster took place in 2003) that results in the grounding of the shuttle fleet. This part actually happened!

Now, on to critiques. The main problem I have with this story is that them bringing all the old equipment out of retirement doesn't actually make any sense. Refurbishing the Saturn V that sat outside in the elements in from of KSC for decades? Modified Apollo capsules for entry into Titan's atmosphere? Then to top it all off, when the military wants to shoot down their launch (for reasons I never fully understood) they do so by refurbishing the X-15 and equipping it with a mothballed anti-satellite missile and then having the entire thing piloted by a retired test pilot from the original flights in the 1960s? None of it made any sense. It was supposed to read as a statement about the backwards motion we've made in aerospace tech (only the X-15 was fast enough to catch up to the shuttle during launch!) but it just came off as silly and unbelievable.

My second issue was with the politics. While I again find it slightly eerie how well he predicted the rise of anti-intellectualism in the US, the degree was again far out of proportion. In his version science in the US is essentially destroyed by when a new (Texan) president rises to power and institutes laws requiring, for example, that all schools teach Aristotelean physics and that the planets circle the earth on crystal spheres. Again it came off as just silly.

As I said in the introduction, I took this book as a caricature (as I believe was intended) of the future as seen from 1997, and as a caricature it is in many ways eerily accurate. However, for me the mix of very hard sci-fi (with all the info dumps on life support systems, low-energy trajectories, and Titan weather patterns that come with that territory) with this near-cartoon politics and mission planning just didn't work all that well. It was a little like if Wile E. Coyote strapped his ACME rocket to his back to catch the roadrunner and then proceeded to give you a 20 minute lecture on the delta-V requirements required to reach the roadrunner who had positioned himself at the Earth-Moon L2 point. It just doesn't work for me.

However, when all is said and done, I still had fun reading it even though it was a bit of a concept fail for me. If you are thinking about reading this, read "Voyage" first.

[Rusty · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t believe in prophets. I’ve mentioned this before, after something close to 500 written reviews, I’m pretty sure I’ve covered this elsewhere, but it bears repeating: You won’t convince anyone your faith is correct by mentioning a fulfilled prophecy.

Case in point, the Book of Mormon mentions a man named Joseph Smith will arise in the last days to spread the good news of American Jesus, or something like that. The Baha’i have books of fulfilled prophecies that point to their faith being correct. And don’t get me started on Evangelical Christianity. In some circles people just show up for a weekly prophetic utterance and then move on to whatever else they were doing in their lives.

There are sects and sub-sects, faiths and cults and seers the world over, going back as long as we’ve had the written word, that have been able to prophecy about what is to come. They are almost always wrong, and when they are right about something, it’s couched in so much wrong that it’s utterly useless.

Prophets are hucksters, and there no exceptions.

Stephen Baxter is a prophet.

I read this book for the first time in the late 90’s, probably within a year or two it coming out in paperback. This book outlined the events of the first 20 years on the 21st century better than anyone I think ever has laid out a near future in a work of fiction. Ever.

The story began sometime in the ballpark of 2003 or 2004. The opening chapters are about the destruction of the Columbia spacecraft during re-entry into earth’s atmosphere, and follows the rise of the religious right in America and the election of a U.S. President that immediately tries to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border to keep out non-white’s.

If I hadn’t read this 25ish years ago, I would have surely believed it had been written as an alt-history book very recently.

So, there’s that. Scary how much Baxter got right. Made me feel weird reading it again.

And beyond all the eerily accurate outlook on the near future of the time, I found the actual story being told very entertaining. Loved this book, not one I’d have ever thought of as one of Baxter’s classics, but something I think of as a real success.

Oh, it’s about NASA doing a one-shot stunt manned mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, as the brass realizes that the world doesn’t give a shit about space exploration and they are soon to be shut down for good.

This book is dark as hell and has about as pessimistic view of humanity as imaginable. He’s probably right about that.

[Andrew McLauthlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Reading this on the Kindle, I'm not sure how long it was, but it felt like it took a long time to get through. Part of that, though, was that some of this was pretty slow reading. There's a detailed, and pessimistic description of NASA going forward in here as well as very detailed space journeys. I like that, it's detail I like to see, but it also does make it harder (slower) to read.

Overall, the book definitely seemed pretty pessimistic, and that's ok, but then the ending jumped us into something completely different and left before explaining it. I'll be curious to see what the next book in the series does.

[Jeff J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite being advertised as the second book of a trilogy this is actually a stand-alone novel, the only commonality is that both books are alternate histories of the US space program. The crash landing of a space shuttle ends the program, at the same time a probe finds signs of life on Titan, a moon of Saturn. Excess hardware from the Apollo and space shuttle programs is used to send a manned mission to Titan. There were some seemingly unrelated storylines that I found puzzling, but it all came together in the end.

[Colin · Rating 1 out of 5]

A little too much pontification for my taste. The author basically uses this book as a vehicle for an extended anti-conservative, anti-Christian, anti-military rant.

If you are rabidly anti-conservative, anti-Christian, anti-military, and you enjoy reading such rants, maybe you will enjoy this. Otherwise, you probably won't.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 Stars
There was too much stupidity and not enough story. Way to many important details left out, and too much BS left in. The USA doesn't change anything as fast as in this book. Why does he hate the USAF anyway? Just craziness and laziness. He needs an editor with a firm red pencil.

[Simon J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Comparable to Kim Robinson's Mars trilogy, for good and bad: It's puzzle that authors so able to imagine plausible things beyond this world should struggle so to imagine plausible things of this world. The science fiction—the worlds and journeys—is excellent. The people and politics, not so much.

[Pamr · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is a great book until the last chapter - whatever you do do not read the last chapter you will be extremely disappointed and that is why it gets two stars for a book worth 3 to 4 until then!

[MaryAnn Johanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The ambition of this book doesn't become clear till near the end... and it is going to haunt me for a very long time...

[Øystein Brekke · Rating 3 out of 5]

At the time I read it, the generally dystopian tone annoyed me, and seemed unrealistic. It certainly doesn't feel unrealistic anymore.