Titan

Rating:
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: After "The Time Ships" and "Ring," I couldn't wait to read "Titan." And Stephen Baxter's new book sure gets off to a great start. I turned 50 this year and his treatment of the decline of general interest in the great adventure of space exploration struck a very responsive note. But what happened at the end of the book? It seems as if what should be a sequel has been compressed into a vague, hastily written last chapter. Please, Mr. Baxter, after the exhilarating, wondrous yarn that you weave until the death of the last character, why did you let us down? Your "resurrection" scenario had me saying, "Huh?" How does it happen? Where's the speculative science? How are they going to build that log cabin without a Home Depot nearby? In addition to the Truth, there has to be better writing out there to do justice to such a great story line. Shucks, what a letdown!

Rating:
Summary: Dark and scary
Review: Except from being a textbook which must be an obligatory read for every NASA employee, it offers a very scary and freighting future for mankind. I have to admit that I did like the textbook science parts put I couldn't quite cope with the negative aspects of the whole story. According to Murphy's Law 'If anything goes wrong it will', the book develops a future where the USA withdraws from all international efforts for peace and development. The newly elected president and his cabinet believe that science has reached its limit and that it can't advance anymore. This nutty leadership committee defines a new society strongly based on religious ambitions. The churches welcome this of course and help to turn the nation's mindset into a backward society based on religion (science is prohibited). On top of that, the USA consistently threatens China with biological warfare. Oh yes, I forget the comet which is approaching earth! This doesn't sound like a story about a mission to Titan at all!? Yes agreed, the main plot is about a mission to Titan but Stephen Baxter tries to enhance the boring story (a 7 years flight through the darkness is not quite entertaining) with elements about mankind screwing up big time. The aspect of the USA screwing up is certainly within the realm of reality and I think this is what most people found so disturbing in that story. The entire narrative would be of great epic ambitions, however, the negative touch and style is so very unpleasant that I was really happy when I finished the book.

Rating:
Summary: Made me want to shoot myself
Review: Possibly one of the most dreary, depressing, and negative books I have ever read. By the last fourth of the book, nearly everything that could go wrong has, in fact, gone wrong, and I found myself wishing the main characters would go ahead and die. A short Spielberg-meets-Kubrick in AI resurrection at the end fails to forgive the otherwise bleak conclusion. Worth a read, I suppose, if you are in the mood to wallow in pity.

Rating:
Summary: Great stuff - but it'll put you off space travel for life
Review: In a similar vein to the excellent Moonseed, Titan starts off rather slowly. I personally didn't find the political background particularly enthralling and fear that the early lack of pace could dissuade some readers from completing the book. Once the mission starts however, Baxter's research really pays off and I was totally hooked. The physical dangers, smells, claustrophobia and sheer cruddy squalor of space travel has never before been so vividly portrayed. I now have some understanding of the heroic feat of those guys on Mir! Someone criticised the book because they disliked the characters. I would argue that this is because the characters seem so real, with their hang-ups and warts and all - just like the rest of us! This is far more satisfying than the one-dimentional caricatures you tend to find in a Bova novel for example. OK, so Mr NASA expert could pick a few holes in the technology, but to the average punter, this is the next best thing to being there (not that I'd particularly want to!). Great stuff and a suitably visionary ending.

Rating:
Summary: Deja Vu
Review: I, like millions of others around the world, sat horrified watching the events of the real life tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia crashing to Earth in Feb 2003. One of the first things that came to my mind was that I read a similar scenario back in 1997 in Stephen Baxters 'Titan'. I quickly grabbed the book and started browsing through the first couple of chapters to discover, to my horror, that the space shuttle portrayed in Titan was Columbia. I remembered back to when I read the book and thought it was one of the best introductions to a SF book I had read in ages. It was my first 'Baxter" novel and I was amazed at the detail of the description of the events of Columbia going down. There was a survivor in the book which helped develop the plot, but the timing early 21st century and naming the shuttle is just a bit to eerie for me. I hope the rest of the events in the book do not lead to fruition as it is quite depressing for mankind. The current events in the world make it hard to be optimistic.
Getting back to the book I found the majority of it a great read, it did have parts that seemed to drag on but Baxters knowledge of Titan is first rate. I have just read Ralph Lorenzs non fiction book 'Lifting Titans Veil' and many of Baxters Titan sequences are acknowledged by Lorenz. I found the last chapter a bit too far fetched and probably would have benefited to being left out all together.
I hope the rest of Titan remains in the fiction category and that man pushes forward into space and one day can visit a wonderous place like Titan.

Rating:
Summary: Alternate future
Review: The scientific details are amazing, and the glimpse the book allows to the space program is priceless.
And today it's creepily close to reality: Columbia is lost and the Chinese are going to space...

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful landscapes and space, poor character development
Review: Baxter excels at drawing pictures of landscapes, institutions, and people. An emotional landscape of cynicism, pessimism, depression and decay is beautifully maintained throughout the book. Decay and loss is emphasized so unrelentingly as to be almost humorous. Every statement uttered reflects absolutely universal decline.

As mentioned by others, the focus on excretory functions and puss filled wounds is excessive and borders on the comical. In one death scene, a long fart replaces the usual last sigh. I could hardly believe what I read. Was that intentionally comical?

The characters were drawn well visually, but didn't evolve. They remained static and distant, fulfilling their function for the plot.

Even so, there were moments of wonder: feeling the isolation of infinite space, seeing the Earth, the globe on which all of history has transpired, the size of a dime at arm's length, and seeing the Saturn V rocket into orbit.

The ending was also an ludicrous departure from the mostly hard science that preceded it. Why be so meticulous with your research for the rest of the book if you delve into total fantasy at the end.

Titan was a visual beauty filled with bleak, superficial characters.

Rating:
Summary: An overwritten epic
Review: Stephen Baxter's "Titan" is all about good ol' NASA space exploration and politics.

Everything starts in the year 2004, when NASA's Cassini probe detects indications of life on Titan (that moon of Saturn). However, due to the anti-science atmosphere of USA's concervative and closed-minded politics, it is up to a couple of NASA's most brilliant minds to launch a low-cost mission to Titan for further investigation. In lead of those science enthusiasts is Paula Benacerraf, a middle aged NASA technician and astronaut and a grandmother of two boys.

After a long political struggle, a chiep space vessel build from age old Apollo modules descends from the surface of the Earth with a crew of five, with Paula Benacerraf as the mission supervisor. After that the novel is divided into two levels, as it describes the mission to Titan while also concentrating on the deteriorating political situation on Earth.

The book is filled with minor characters that don't often contribute enough (or at all...) to the story. Only Benacerraf, who's a minor main character, gets properly developed as the character building aspects are left at minimal, hence rendering all the other chracters flat and two dimencional.

Stephen Baxter's writing is barren and uninspired, at most times devoid of color and nuances. It's also overly descriptive and babbling, giving the novel a strong sence of it being overwritten.

There are also big problems with the construction and the pacing of the surprisingly plotless story. The novel is filled with long, uneventfull scenes and it relies on improbable events that arise out of nowhere, wich renders the credibility of the story under question. And on top of that, the book is filled with pointless subplots that don't contribute to the story as a whole. Even more irritatingly a lot of questions are left unanswered as the sublots are left unfinished, as if due to incompetent editing.

And it doesn't help one bit that the ending of the book is simply not baliavable and it diminishes the credibility of the novel to a point where it seems to be only a waste of time.

Nevertheless, at times the book conveyed a true sence of childlike wonder and scienticic and intellectual intrigue, but it could have used more beliavability and substance. A lot more.

Rating:
Summary: Read it for the realism, not for the ride
Review: If you're interested in what it might *really* be like to travel great (i.e., interplanetary) distances in space, you might want to check this book out. But be warned: overall, it's a depressing book. Space travel is not glorious or exciting: it's about food, and excrement, and dirt, and cramped quarters, and exercise, and illness, and irritability, and some amazing sights every couple of years. There's kind of a pick-me-up ending, but it doesn't compensate.

In summary, I'd recommend Titan as a plausibly realistic depiction of interplanetary space travel. It points out the multitude of problems to be solved before human exploration of the solar system is truly possible (and makes clear the need for much more advanced propulsion technology to make such trips shorter!). If that's not what you're into, don't read it. Not only is it mostly depressing, it's long and depressing.

Rating:
Summary: Depressing SF Novel Leads to Massive Depression
Review: As shown by his work in this novel, technically Stephen Baxter isn't a bad writer. The story does pull you along and your interest is maintained.

Unfortunately Stephen has a Message To Sell You and he's not going to let anything get in the way of it. Other reviews have told you of the massive right wing decline of the USA in this novel. What they don't tell you is that it is utterly implausible in the way it is presented here.

Characters seem to lack any sense of humor or consistency. No one has any coping mechanisms. The astronauts are all disfunctional introverts and idiots. Characters do things clearly because they advance the plot, regardless of whether their actions make sense or are in harmony with the character.

There is a scatalogical focus on how people (...) in space that borders on the ridiculous.

There is one series of scenes, where members of the Air Force set in motion to destroy the last NASA mission. I won't spoil it by telling you everything, but the problem is that it's completely unnecessary to the plot of the book, it wastes a great deal of the readers time, and there are no expected repercussions. It doesn't foreshadow anything, the characters continue to appear later in the novel as if nothing happened. It's like the writer decided "action and peril must go here" and stuck the scenes in for no other reason.

Aside from all this, and the unrelenting depressing tone of the story, Mr. Baxter clear has talent. This book doesn't show his best form, but at least it's not a Trek spinoff.