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Summary: A somewhat flawed book about a manned mission to Mars
Review: Voyage, by Stephen Baxter, offers the intriguing possibility of NASA undertaking a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s instead of building the space shuttle. The book, however, suffers from a couple of flaws.First, the narrative alternates between the years leading from the Apollo moon landing to the launch of the Mars expedition and the voyage to Mars itself. It is sometimes very hard to keep the two separate stories straight in one's memory. There is also next to nothing about what happens on Mars after the landing. Second, Baxter totally fails to suggest that doing Mars instead of the shuttle would have any effect on society and history outside of the US space program. This is doubly puzzling because he basis his altered history on a John F. Kennedy having survived Dallas a cripple. (That premise may be one built on quicksand. Recent revelations about JFK's health problems and his private feelings toward space exploration make the idea of his physical survival into the 80s problematic, not to speak of his advocacy of a manned mission to Mars.) Regardless, the survival of JFK to be a kind of gray eminence of the Democratic Party would have been an interesting concept to explore, even without the space theme. The story also has a bitter sweet air about it. Several Apollo lunar missions, as well as a number of unmanned probes such as the Pioneer and Voyager missions to the Outer Planets are cancelled to pay for sending people to Mars. And there is the faint whiff of melancholy that after humans return from Mars, there might be no further expeditions.
Rating: 
Summary: Arghh...very frustrating, but I guess that was the point!
Review: Wow! I really, REALLY enjoyed this book. It is an homage to the Apollo program as much as it is about a manned Mars mission. Baxter very accurately conveys the frustration that so many people feel about how the US space program just seemed to dry up and go away for almost the entire 1970's, and how all of the momentum that the Apollo program generated was just squandered. Page after page after page I wished that reality had been closer to Baxter's vision, but instead we just got a few skylab missions and then years of nothing. This coupled with the fact that any real manned Mars mission is years away was very frustrating! The book is cleverly structured so that the events leading up to the mission very closely parallel events from the real apollo program. An early disaster with loss of life, the crew selection, the lead-in missions, the selection of the contractors to build the hardware, etc, were all disguised versions of very real events from the 1960's. It was as if Baxter were nodding and winking to fans of the Apollo program. When one visits either Kennedy Space Center or Johnson Space Center one can see actual, flight-ready Saturn V launch vehicles that were never sent into space(the Saturn V in Huntsville, Alabama is not a flight article but a test article). Looking at those earthbound spacecraft produces similar feelings to reading this book: both make a person feel that the potential of the space program was not lived up to in those decades. Now those Saturn V's are rusting museum pieces, as are hopes for a manned Mars mission anytime soon.
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Summary: Baxter Beat Me To It!
Review: You have to ask yourself if the alternate history scenarios portrayed within this amazing book would have meant a more glorious space program. Would sacrificing half of the Apollo lunar missions, the Viking landers, the Voyager probes and the Space Shuttle have been worth it for one, single flight to Mars? That is a question Baxter makes you ask yourself through implication. This novel is one of the finest creations of 1990s science fiction. But I was a bit annoyed when I read it, as I was researching to write a very similar book to this! (aw, shucks) All the flashbacks within the story should have been annoying but Steve Baxter makes it all work brilliantly. In an ideal world with lots of funding, ALL the Apollo lunar missions would have been retained, there would have been a series of Skylab space stations (unlike the International Space Station, which is practically a boondoggle)and mankind would have worked and lived on Mars. All this before the 21st Century. SIGH...
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