Reading this book is a real experience. It’s not always comfortable — there are some very intense moments in the story, not everything goes well, and in fact some things go very, very bad. But to Baxter’s credit, the detail he provides, and the pacing of the story, make...
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Reading this book is a real experience. It’s not always comfortable — there are some very intense moments in the story, not everything goes well, and in fact some things go very, very bad. But to Baxter’s credit, the detail he provides, and the pacing of the story, make it real. Just be prepared.
Titan might be the most fascinating object in our solar system (besides Earth). It has a geography, it has rain, it has lakes, it has chemistry. Who knows what it has. And that’s what drew me to the book in the first place — the promise of a “hard” science fiction story about Titan and the investigation of possible life on Titan.
And that is a big part of the premise behind the book. Baxter takes off on an alternative history, taking as context the Cassini mission to Saturn, its Huygens probe’s landing on Titan, and the discoveries made about Titan’s geography and its chemistry.
That part of the story dovetails with a desperate time for NASA, US space exploration, and the country as a whole. The shuttle program has suffered a major disaster, and enthusiasm for space exploration is dying down. A prospective new President is not science friendly and will undoubtedly take the program away from scientific objectives, toward military and commercial ones. And he is leading the country into a potentially catastrophic confrontation with China.
The old time NASA, both old timers and younger people who have signed on with NASA to pursue old time objectives, are desperate. The possibility of hacking together a Titan mission represents a big gamble and possibly one last hurrah.
The same can be said of the gambles taken by Baxter’s main characters, notably astronaut Paula Benacerraf and scientist Isaac Rosenberg. For Rosenberg, nothing could be more important than the investigation of Titan, both personally and from a strategic standpoint for the continued exploration of the solar system. And his life is singly focused on scientific exploration. For Benacerraf, it’s a chance to do something of great and lasting value, as opposed to a life defined as “ex-astronaut” and survivor of a shuttle disaster, as heavy as the personal cost may be.
Desperation looms throughout the book. The mission is desperate, the agency that launches it is desperate, the country behind it is desperate, and things only get more desperate as the story unfolds.
There’s not a whole lot of light stuff here. It’s a hard story, but completely engaging. The reader fortunately takes on the lives of its characters from the safety of a reader’s perspective.
Baxter also builds the story on a lot of science, some of it real and some of it speculative. The Huygens probe actually landed on Titan in 2005, well after the book was written, so some of the facts, and the resulting experience of the mission’s crew, are different than they would be in reality. But I don’t think that detracts from the detailed realism of Baxter’s story.
It’s a story you can fall into and feel as though you are really living through it. Just don’t expect it to be a bed of roses. But . . . it won’t spoil the ending if I say there really is life at the end of the tunnel.
