Stephen Baxter: Voyage (Hardcover, 1996, Harper Collins/Voyager)
Hardcover, 660 pages
Published Oct. 19, 1996 by Harper Collins/Voyager.
In a parallel world where JFK survived the assassination attempt in Dallas, as the Apollo programme reaches its triumphant goal the former President encourages NASA to build on this success and send men to Mars.
Pretty weak, especially by Baxter's high standards. The plot is minimal, with long stretches of nothing but dreary backstory, boring conversations, and endless technical explanations. It's not so much a novel of a voyage to Mars as it is an exercise in tedium. Plus, of course, there's the apparent plagiarism. Very disappointing!
It seems particularly appropriate this week during the 30th Anniversary of the moon landing that I’m reviewing this particular book. Voyage is an alternative history exploring what might have happened if, following the moon landings, instead of developing the Space Shuttle, NASA had concentrated its resources to landing a man on Mars.
The book starts when Neil Armstrong stands on the moon and finishes in the 80s when NASA sends a mission to Mars.
The result is a fascinating but flawed look into what might have been. Baxter has obviously done a prodigious amount of research into NASA. Reading this book you learn a lot about the culture, language and details of space exploration.
Unfortunately it is these very details which work against the book as a story. You probably won’t be surprised to discover that astronauts use a lot of acronyms. In keeping with the realistic tone of the …
It seems particularly appropriate this week during the 30th Anniversary of the moon landing that I’m reviewing this particular book. Voyage is an alternative history exploring what might have happened if, following the moon landings, instead of developing the Space Shuttle, NASA had concentrated its resources to landing a man on Mars.
The book starts when Neil Armstrong stands on the moon and finishes in the 80s when NASA sends a mission to Mars.
The result is a fascinating but flawed look into what might have been. Baxter has obviously done a prodigious amount of research into NASA. Reading this book you learn a lot about the culture, language and details of space exploration.
Unfortunately it is these very details which work against the book as a story. You probably won’t be surprised to discover that astronauts use a lot of acronyms. In keeping with the realistic tone of the book, so does Baxter. Which means he has to explain them all to us.
All the description and explanation slows the actual story down to a crawl. While I found the details of the space flights and training very interesting, I didn’t really connect with any of the characters in the book till around the half way mark.
This is a shame since once I had made that connection (created by a specific traumatic event) I found that the story picked up pace and became much more gripping to read.
A second problem is the sheer number of characters in this book. Covering 2 decades as it does, it flits between many viewpoints never giving you very long to learn about any individual character, apart from the one central character who I found to be intensely whiney and annoying.
Despite these flaws I still think this is an amazing book and well worth reading. It does an excellent job of showing the sheer scale of difficulty that is involved in putting man on any other planet. Baxter also debates the wisdom of such stunt missions or indeed space travel at all, letting each side put forward their arguments without heavy bias.
This made up for not seeing Apollo 13, in fact I may have assumed that as I'd read Voyage I didn't need to see Apollo 13 and so didn't. Very big and technically-minded.
