Customer Reviews

Trouble On Titan

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I read "Trouble on Titan" around 1970, when the Apollo program was at its apex, and the human exploration of the Solar System seemed only a short step away. My review is based on old memories, but I can still remember a mining colony on Titan and jet craft using oxygen for fuel and burning Titan's methane atmosphere. We've learned much since this book was written, and Titan's atmosphere has less methane than we originally thought. However, this book was well written, and I am sure will intrigue my son as much as it intrigued his father, who is now working at NASA on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. This book has that old-style sci-fi flavor that made another world seem more like reality than fantasy. I think if you enjoyed the Lucky Starr and David Starr stories by Asimov, you will enjoy "Trouble on Titan."

Twelve years after the first review, and Cassini is there. It's Spring on Titan, and it's raining methane. Hydrocarbons are lying about on the surface, in pools larger than the great lakes. Just by dumb luck, the place turns out to be almost exactly how Nourse imagined it. What a piece of work is Man. Especially that one.

I read it in 1960, and could see then that it's not really about sports-rockets (although there is a cool one). It's everything a "juvenile" could ever be, with a father-son rapprochement, East-is-East friendships that grow between opposite equals, first love, labor trouble, industrial sabotage, and a rebellion conspiracy. When I first read Heinlein later that year, I thought he suffered by comparison. I was eight at the time.