Subject: Review: Baxter's _Voyage_

From: [email-masked] (Paul S. Jenkins)
Date: 18 May 1999 15:22:33 -0400

_ Voyage _ by Stephen Baxter
	Review Copyright (c) 1999 Paul S. Jenkins

_Voyage_ is the story of a mission that never was. In this long and
meticulously researched novel Baxter speculates that if John F.  Kennedy
had survived the assassination attempt in Dallas, he might have provided
the political impetus to allow NASA to extend beyond the Moon-landings and
initiate a manned mission to Mars.

_Voyage_ is a very detailed, convincing portrayal of realistic characters
with genuine human traits, striving towards a breathtaking technological
and political goal. It's written like 'faction' -- a dramatic narrative of
known facts -- except, this is fiction.

Baxter himself applied to NASA to be an astronaut, went through various
tests, and was eventually turned down. Writing this novel must have been
the next best thing.

Just occasionally the style displays a klunkiness that's possibly the
result of hasty editing, but generally it's a smooth and engrossing read,
despite the abundance of hard SF detail.

The story of NASA's manned trip to Mars is told in converging threads: the
outward flight itself, and the lead-up to the launch. It's cleverly done,
so that although we know from the first few pages that Baxter's
protagonist -- the American geologist Natalie York -- is going to Mars, we
don't know exactly how. The narrative thread culminating in the launch
gradually reveals her path into history.

Watching the first three episodes of Tom Hanks' _From the Earth to the
Moon_, being serialized now on the UK's Channel Four TV, I was struck by
the number of events depicted in its presumably factual account of the
Apollo programme, that have almost exact parallels in Baxter's fictional
account of the Mars mission. Hanks' TV series is partly based on Andrew
Chaikin's book _A Man on the Moon_ (Penguin 1995), which it seems likely
Baxter has read, either incidentally or as specific research for
_Voyage_. I haven't read Chaikin's book, nor do I know how much of it is
in Hanks' TV series, but several of the telling events and conversations
-- for example concerning the crew's opinion of the spacecraft ("a
lemon"), the meeting to announce the crew assignments ("the men who are
going to Mars/the Moon are in this room, looking at me now"), or the
enforced retirement of the head of the engineering company that made the
spacecraft -- all these appear in both Hanks' story of Apollo and Baxter's
story of the Mars mission.  Such parallels would be legitimate, it seems
to me, if the Mars mission was an alternative to Apollo, but it is
supposed to be subsequent to it, and so the parallels appear as a case of
history repeating itself. I draw no conclusions from this, but it did make
me wonder.

(_Voyage_ has recently been serialized on BBC Radio Four, in five
half-hour episodes. For me, reading the book in parallel with the
radio-drama enhanced both.)

On the whole I was impressed by _Voyage_. It reads like the dramatization
of real events, which means that as fiction it succeeds.  One proviso,
however: Stephen Baxter is British, and he has written an American
book. As a British reader I found it totally convincing; an American might
take a different view.

%A   Baxter, Stephen
%T   Voyage
%I   HarperCollins Voyager
%C   London
%D   1997 (copyright 1996)
%G   ISBN 0 00 648037 3
%P   591 pp.
%O   paperback GBP 6.99 

Paul S. Jenkins | More reviews at: 
Portsmouth   UK | http://www.cix.co.uk/~willowsoft/revup/