Rating: 
Summary: What might have been? Definately!
Review: Alternate history. It's a fun concept to fiddle with. . . what if Hitler had won? What if VonBraun had went to the Soviet Union after WWII? What if Kennedy had not died.Stephen Baxter answers the last question in grand form in the novel Voyage. Voyage is the story of a manned mission to Mars in the 1980's, or perhaps, more specifically, the build up to and execution of the mission. Baxter brings his aeronautical expertise to this book, as well as a good command of history (aborted and realized). The story of Voyage, the tech, the flow. . . all are believable and the story is told quite well. It reminded me of watching "From the Earth to the Moon" to be quite honest. Give Baxter a few evenings of your time, and you'll get a good read from it. Just ignore the rather frequent use of the Lord's name in vain. ;-)
Rating: 
Summary: Another good concept ruined
Review: As a big proponent of a manned mission to Mars, I looked forward to reading this book. While Baxter's characters showed a lot of promise, the slow pace of the story and lack of any possible conflict failed to keep my interest.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent story. I highly recommend it.
Review: I am a fan of 'Sciene Probable'. That is to say, science fiction that is based on fact and known science. This book hits that mark dead on. The adherence to the technicals and history of the Apollo program is well done and worked seemlessly into this alternate history. The description of science is detailed enough for those so inclined while not going so overboard as to bore the less technical reader. The structure of the writing is perfect for a story that must cover such a long period of time. Baxter is able to carry the story over decades without ever losing momentum or the interest of the reader. The character development is great. The story is progressively told from the perspective of different characters, in the third person. Overall, I highly recommend this book. One of the best I've read.
Rating:
Summary: Better than I thought
Review: I came to know Baxter's writing through his more SF type books such as Ring and the Time Ships and in those respects he seemed a natural successor to HG Wells and the others who used ideas to drive their novels. And then I see this book. The first thing that tipped me off is that there's no mention of his other SF books in any of the author bios, even though some of them have won awards and stuff and been generally acclaimed, in fact if you didn't see the listing of his novels in the front of the book you'd think that this was his first novel. So, geez, I thought to myself, a SF writer trying to play down his science fiction past in order to make himself more appealing to the mainstream, nothing I hadn't seen before but since I had faith in Baxter I figured I'd give the book a try. And you know what it's not bad, the history extrapolation are just as good as anyone else's but the premise is good and the feelings that it ignites in you, the actual thought of us going to Mars, if there's anything that rekindles that desire to get there, this could be the book. The book focuses more on actually getting there as opposed to what we would do there which is a small complaint, I would have at least like to see what happens to the characters when they got back to Earth and got on with their lives, I mean face it after going to Mars everything else is certainly downhill from there. That and the characters are a tad stock at times, of course the woman is a no nonsese lady with a chip on her shoulder and the African character is always angry and all the astronauts are "just one of the boys" and you do realize this during the course of the book but really when you take everything together it's a good effort. It does the job which is show how we could get to Mars and manages to be entertaining along the way, encompassing truimph and tragedy and showing the lengths that people are driven to realize their goals. Baxter's next book after this was something else along this line as well (Titan) and while I hope he gets back to his older stuff I can make do with this for the moment, it goes down quite easy.
Rating:
Summary: It really could have happened
Review: I can remember, as a child of 10 or so, watching the ghostly pictures on television of Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the moon. I was hooked on the adventure and became an avid Apollo watcher until December '72 when the last mission flew.There was a lot of speculation that the Americans would follow up their moon triumph with a push at the big one and go to Mars. Despite the good reasons, I was always disappointed that it didn't happen. I'm sure many others were too and, especially if you are one of them, it is therefore with some excitement that you should approach this book. Stephen Baxter has created a wonderful 'could have been' story of the first manned flight to Mars in the mid 1980s. It is all so plausible - and there are even some real life characters. Anyone who has read Andrew Chaikin's "A man on the moon - the voyages of the Apollo astronauts" or Henry Cooper's "Thirteen: The Apollo flight that failed" will find resonances from these factual accounts in Baxter's story. The characters are very well crafted and, after reading the book, you will find it difficult to separate Stone, York and Gershon, Baxter's astronauts, from Armstrong, Conrad, Schmitt and all the others who really did fly in the great adventure.Read this book - a very believable and gripping tale
Rating:
Summary: From the Earth to Mars: An Alternate History
Review: I loved Tom Hanks HBO mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon." If you did, buy this book! Mr. Baxter takes the reader through an alternate history of the exploration of space where Nixon followed Cap Weinberger's suggestion to keep the space program focused on going to Mars instead of trying to build a reusable shuttle. A more Soviet approach of continuing improvements in Apollos and Saturns, ever lowering launch costs and keeping aerospace workers employed results. Further developments along the path to Mars that we never took are explored in this wonderful and technically believable story and a cast of characters that is well above the average of the typical alternate history novel. As a long time believer that we made a mistake in not going to Mars in the '80's, (Von Braun planned a trip in 1982) I finished the book believing we are better off in our space exploration because we didn't take this trip at that time. I don't think that was the intention of the author, but he's laid the story out so realistically, the conclusions of the reader are just like in real life! It's a rare novel that changes my point of view so fundamentally. I think you'll find it surprising as well.
Rating:
Summary: A manned trip to Mars - 15 years ago!
Review: I loved Tom Hanks HBO mini-series "From the Earth to the Moon." If you did, buy this book! Mr. Baxter takes the reader through an alternate history of the exploration of space where Nixon followed Cap Weinberger's suggestion to keep the space program focused on going to Mars instead of trying to build a reusable shuttle. A more Soviet approach of continuing improvements in Apollos and Saturns, ever lowering launch costs and keeping aerospace workers employed results. Further developments along the path to Mars that we never took are explored in this wonderful and technically believable story and a cast of characters that is well above the average of the typical alternate history novel. As a long time believer that we made a mistake in not going to Mars in the '80's, (Von Braun planned a trip in 1982) I finished the book believing we are better off in our space exploration because we didn't take this trip at that time. I don't think that was the intention of the author, but he's laid the story out so realistically, the conclusions of the reader are just like in real life! It's a rare novel that changes my point of view so fundamentally. I think you'll find it surprising as well.
Rating: 
Summary: Uh...Wow....I guess
Review: If Tom Clancy is the "Tom Clancy" of warfare, Baxter may be his equal in Engineering. The book is written in near scholarly text when explaining the nueclear rockets, and chemical propellant vehicles that mankind would have used to go to Mars in the 1980's. That was a turn-off. Another turn-off is the non-chronological sequence the story is told in. The first passages have the crew that is going to Mars on the pad. Then the book retreats from there to when Natalie York, Mission Specialist and one of the many protagonists in the book, decided to become an astronaut. And then it comes back to different points in the Mars Mission inter-mixed with the life stories of the other two Mars explorers going to the Red Planet with her, the bids to build the hardware going on the voyage, the shakeups at NASA, even York's search for an apartment near NASA. It would have been better if it was told from point A to B. I found this to be a terrible way to have to read the book. For instance, you knew the Nueclear rocket program had it's problems before he wrote about them since it was explained earlier in the book. On the plus side, and there are many plusses, the book explains from an "insider's" viewpoint what these astronauts go through. It isn't pretty. The sterile appearance of the space program is stripped away with broad strokes. These people are street fighters who look at competitiveness as one of the four food groups. The politics of NASA, the in-fighting, the seemingly ordinary choices these men and women made that would effect how history books are written decades later are described in hard-headed, unromantic terms. All at once you are enamored and a little bothered at what is written. "Could it be that superficial and heroic at the same time?" was a question I kept asking myself. And then there is the subtext of the book. Let's go to Mars. We knew we could do it in the 1970's and the fact that we haven't done it has deposited this country at a destination that is subordinate to its destiny.
Rating:
Summary: Another good concept ruined
Review: It's a good idea for a plot, and it certainly deserves better than the truly cringeworthy prose offered. I know nothing of Baxter other than this book, but it seems he's a much better technical writer than a prose writer. His charaters are truly cardboard cutouts, making their melodramatic internal monologues laughable. The worst part is the frequent lapses into British English. Baxter duns us over the head, again and again, how NASA is chock full of cornfed Midwesterners and drawling Texans, then gives them dialog like "rubbish," "mucking about," and "pieces of kit." Right. The jacket copy touts how much research Baxter did to achieve technical authenticity. I'm sure he did, as the technical verbiage is often stultifying in its detail. I guess he didn't devote as much effort to dialogue.
Rating:
Summary: Technically excellent, but overwhelmed by back story
Review: Stephen Baxter's VOYAGE takes place in an alternate past: What if John F. Kennedy had survived assassination and lobbied for NASA to send astronauts to Mars in the 1980s, instead of building the space shuttle? It's a fascinating premise and certainly one worthy of a unique Mars novel.
Baxter himself holds a doctorate in engineering, so it's no surprise that he really knows his way around the technical stuff of spaceflight. He's quite knowledgeable in space history, as well. He presents an impressive amount of authentic detail, far more than I've seen in any other novel of its kind. Perhaps too much, in fact, because many spaceflight scenes repeat events and dialogue from real-life missions almost verbatim. On the whole, VOYAGE feels quite faithful to the era described, even if it's somewhat too faithful. It's also interesting to catch him using a few historic dates in spaceflight -- July 1976, April 1981, January 1986 -- so we can contemplate the differences in his alternate past.
Geologist Natalie York is VOYAGE's most reliable protagonist; she comes across as determined but not easy to root for. Baxter makes a few generalizations based on astronaut mythology, and he rarely hides his disdain for NASA's old "pilot vs. scientist" culture. One veteran astronaut is so surly that in the real space program he would have been permanently shelved from flight status (a la Wally Schirra). Nonetheless, Baxter avoids many of the stilted stereotypes of Ben Bova's Mars novels, so at least these characters are more subtle and level-headed. For the most part, he steers clear of the soap-opera style plotting that cripples most Mars books, and that alone is commendable.
VOYAGE's "major malfunction" is that Baxter spends far too much time laying the groundwork for going to Mars, and it dominates the pace of the novel. Almost nine tenths of this book is back story. The launch of the Mars flight opens the book, but by page 200 we're only up to Day 3 and we've barely left the earth behind us. At page 466, we've reached Day 171 of the flight, yet we've only arrived at the swingby of Venus, and we're still almost seven months away from the red planet!
While the author deserves praise for presenting a credible rationale for going to Mars, you can only go so far with a book about a Mars flight without actually describing the flight. I kept pleading for Baxter to get away from the project's early days and get to the damn point, but it practically never happens. Once I figured out how diminished the Mars flight was, it took me ages to finish reading. Because it is so dominated by background, this 772-page story unfolds in almost geologic time.
Even with my complaints, VOYAGE is easily the most technically accomplished and reasonable Mars novel I've ever read, and I've read a great many of them. It is frequently interesting and packed with details, but I just wish Baxter had spent more effort flying the mission instead of building his case. It is a solid four-star novel if not for the heavy reliance on background.
| 
