Title: Voyage
Author: Stephen Baxter
Publisher: Harper Prism
Year: 1997
ISBN: 0061057088
Description: 772 pages
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I've been a "space freak" for over 3 decades. I clearly remember the Apollo 11
moon landing, the Apollo 13 near-disaster, and the long hiatus, when the United
States, in essence, had no manned space program whatsoever.
Voyage is an alternate-history story, where John Kennedy survived assassination
in Dallas, and where Richard Nixon changed his mind and backed a manned Mars mission
instead of the space shuttle program. Author Baxter has researched the events of
our timeline thoroughly, and has created a different, and utterly believable, history.
Voyage is the story of how impossible dreams and seemingly unreachable goals can
drive an organization and a nation to take up the impossible challenges just because
they're there. It shows how the resulting technocracy fosters both excellence and
duplicity. Where people excel in the high-pressure world of insane objectives and
political (and industrial) infighting. It shows just how far people will go to
achieve what they perceive to be a noble goal, and how, just as easily, the same
people can be used up, chewed up and spat out.
The story is multifaceted. It's not just a tech story about a trip to Mars. It doesn't
pull any magic tricks -- the technology the project uses is exactly that which NASA
had considered back in the 60s and 70s. It would've been easy for Baxter to have one
of his characters come up with something analogous to Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" and
"Mars Semi-Direct" plans that will, hopefully in my lifetime, make a manned mission
to Mars possible. But he doesn't. He doesn't pull a political rabbit out of his hat in order to
justify why the political decisions in this novel differ from the ones that actually
were made. It's a story that looks at people -- how the efforts to achieve this
impossible goal can change lives -- even ruin lives -- and how, with the achieving of
ultimate success, wounds and hurts and grieving can be put to rest.
Score: 88 out of 100. An excellent book to read, especially if you're interested in
the political nuts and bolts of NASA and of space travel. I was as enthralled with
Baxter's rendition of the technocratic mechanizations as I was with Natalie York's
improbable rise from geology student to Mars astronaut.
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