Rating: 
Summary: Voyage Defines What Science Fiction Should Be
Review: Voyage provides a benchmark for what true science fiction should be...Taking what is known about science and playing 'what if'...And in this case, Stephen Baxter adds a twist by changing the course of history...Anyone who knows the stories of Project Apollo and the post-lunar Apollo Applications Program, which included Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz, will feel right at home with Voyage...This book makes me proud because of its technical accuracy and attention to detail...Even more stunning and exciting is that someone had the gumption to take one of our greatest 'what ifs' and making it come to life... And although the inter-center rivalry that plays out in the story (Langley vs. Marshall) seems like a dramatic touch, it really isn't...That rivalry has been documented in a number of non-fiction works in the past... The book isn't perfect, though...I really could've done without the broken-romance angle that poor Natalie York is plagued with, and the seemingly one-note performance by Ralph Gershon...But the other elements are there, straight from America's proud spacefaring legacy... At one point, we may yet reach Mars...Much like our missions to the moon, it will be a journey requiring all the resources and talent the United States can muster...
Rating: 
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.
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