Voyage

VOYAGE was the second book by Stephen Baxter that I've read, but it's the best one. I have to say it--Baxter's got stones--big ones. He tackles an alternate history's journey to Mars in 1986 with ease. Everything is researched to the letter and feels real, from the inner workings of NASA to the tragedy of a nuclear-powered Apollo flight (shades of the Challenger disaster) to the characters themselves. Here is a writer who actually gives a damn about the characters he creates, and does not give them the short strift just to lavish everything on the technology. True, I wished there could have been more on the astronauts' exploration on Mars, but that was not Baxter's point. It's _how_ we get to the Red Planet and _why_ we should go that's important. He also shows the scientific cost--no space shuttle, no Voyager or Viking missions... To put everything in simple terms--if you like science fiction, if you are interested in the space program, or if you just like books that are damned good--read VOYAGE.

Stephen Baxter's VOYAGE takes place in an alternate past: What if John F. Kennedy had survived assassination and lobbied for NASA to send astronauts to Mars in the 1980s, instead of building the space shuttle? It's a fascinating premise and certainly one worthy of a unique Mars novel.

Baxter himself holds a doctorate in engineering, so it's no surprise that he really knows his way around the technical stuff of spaceflight. He's quite knowledgeable in space history, as well. He presents an impressive amount of authentic detail, far more than I've seen in any other novel of its kind. Perhaps too much, in fact, because many spaceflight scenes repeat events and dialogue from real-life missions almost verbatim. On the whole, VOYAGE feels quite faithful to the era described, even if it's somewhat too faithful. It's also interesting to catch him using a few historic dates in spaceflight -- July 1976, April 1981, January 1986 -- so we can contemplate the differences in his alternate past.

Geologist Natalie York is VOYAGE's most reliable protagonist; she comes across as determined but not easy to root for. Baxter makes a few generalizations based on astronaut mythology, and he rarely hides his disdain for NASA's old "pilot vs. scientist" culture. One veteran astronaut is so surly that in the real space program he would have been permanently shelved from flight status (a la Wally Schirra). Nonetheless, Baxter avoids many of the stilted stereotypes of Ben Bova's Mars novels, so at least these characters are more subtle and level-headed. For the most part, he steers clear of the soap-opera style plotting that cripples most Mars books, and that alone is commendable.

VOYAGE's "major malfunction" is that Baxter spends far too much time laying the groundwork for going to Mars, and it dominates the pace of the novel. Almost nine tenths of this book is back story. The launch of the Mars flight opens the book, but by page 200 we're only up to Day 3 and we've barely left the earth behind us. At page 466, we've reached Day 171 of the flight, yet we've only arrived at the swingby of Venus, and we're still almost seven months away from the red planet!

While the author deserves praise for presenting a credible rationale for going to Mars, you can only go so far with a book about a Mars flight without actually describing the flight. I kept pleading for Baxter to get away from the project's early days and get to the damn point, but it practically never happens. Once I figured out how diminished the Mars flight was, it took me ages to finish reading. Because it is so dominated by background, this 772-page story unfolds in almost geologic time.

Even with my complaints, VOYAGE is easily the most technically accomplished and reasonable Mars novel I've ever read, and I've read a great many of them. It is frequently interesting and packed with details, but I just wish Baxter had spent more effort flying the mission instead of building his case. It is a solid four-star novel if not for the heavy reliance on background.

Two reviewers have mentioned that this book relies or draws on Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox's excellent nonfiction book, "Apollo." I will go further to say that there is significant plagiarism from that work. I do not use the term "plagiarism" lightly. There are whole passages that Baxter copied almost verbatim. Here's one example--a quote from page 86 of the paperback edition of Voyage--the character is driving to Langley, Virginia:

"When Jim Dana passed Richmond he turned the Corvette off Route 1 and onto the narrow highway 60 headed southeast. The towns were fewer, and smaller. And, at last, after Williamsburg, there seemed to be nothing but forests and marshland, and the occasional farmhouse."

Here is text beginning beginning on page 9 of the new edition of Apollo describing the car trip of Owen Maynard and his family to Langley, Virginia in 1959:

"The next morning they continued south to Richmond, where they turned off busy Highway 1 onto a narrow two-lane road, State Highway 60 and headed southeast. The towns were fewer now, and smaller. Fifty miles outside Richmond they came to the only sizable town on the route, Williamsburg, and after that it seemed there was nothing but forests and marshland and an occasional farmhouse."

There is much, much more. The image of a flight controller lifting his hand from a flight plan leaving a soaking wet image of his hand, a word for word description of what a spacecraft Contract Acceptance Readiness Review is, words of NASA executive Joe Shea put in the mouth of the fictitious person who held his job in the novel, the description of what the fictitious person did when kicked upstairs to NASA headquarters lifted from Murray/Cox's description of Shea's activities down to key phrases, the description of the deportation of a key engineer on the Saturn V taken from the description of what happened to Arthur Rudolph--again taking not just the events but the words used to describe them, descriptive language that painted a word picture of Langley, the word picture of the Mission Control Center after the last Apollo flight (Apollo 17 in real life, Apollo 14 in the novel) down to the little flags left on the consoles and the gumbo party hosted by MER . . . . I could go on for pages.

I have seen the phrase "sang like a rattlesnake" in only two places in my life: in the Murray/Cox description of why two engines of the Apollo 6 second stage shut down early, and why--due to a failure that was identical in almost every respect to the Apollo 6 failure--a nuclear rocket failed in Voyage.

In the discussion of the Mars voyage mission mode in Voyage, one character even echoes a Murray/Cox chapter title (Chapter 9): "What sonofabitch thinks this isn't the right thing to do" or something very close to that.

I challenge anyone to read side by side the parallel sections of Apollo and Voyage and to tell me that Mr. Baxter did not lift whole sentences, key images, colorful and evocative language, quotes, and key ideas. This is not the garden variety accusation of literary plagiarism from non-fiction to fiction that "he stole the idea for this book."

Rather, it is as though Mr. Baxter ingested the whole of Apollo and then regurgitated key portions of it when they fit his narrative.

This is plagiarism, plain and simple. It is an outrage.

And, in case anyone thinks that it is possible that Baxter contacted the authors and obtained permission, it ain't so. I have personally contacted Dr. Charles Murray and he informs me that he has never given permission to Baxter to draw from Apollo, and--further--that he regards this situation as plagiarism.

Stephen Baxter should acknowledge his wrongdoing, should apologize, and should certainly make some sort of financial reparations to Murray and Cox for his appropriation of so much of their very fine book.

H. Paul Honsinger

This is an interesting book about how NASA might have gotten a manned mission to Mars by now. The story revolves around one very dedicated geologist, and her issuance into the boys club of astronauts. The book starts well, but about half way through, Baxter gets bogged down--as so many books about NASA and US space missions seem to--in the details of the mission. The book loses touch with human elements, and is a bit boring.
But, again following previous themes, disaster wakes the plotline up, and Voyage runs with good inertia to the end.
The plotline is well conceived and interesting, but any of you that are interested in the alternative history (which I have read only one other book about), Baxter may disappoint you. There is very little in Voyage of any political or historical consequence (well, other than NASA getting a manned mission to Mars). Real figures in history (such as JFK) take a very big back seat, and add almost nothing to this book. I found this lack of tie-in disappointing (especially with the teaser on the back cover mentioning JFK).
And finally, I was dismayed with the last four pages of this book. Baxter builds everything up nicely for the finale, and completely misses. The ending is completely out-of-character, and performs a jump back to "NASA mission mode" (i.e., downplayed and disappointing). Too bad, as otherwise, Voyage was an interesting read.
3 of 5 stars

You have to ask yourself if the alternate history scenarios portrayed within this amazing book would have meant a more glorious space program. Would sacrificing half of the Apollo lunar missions, the Viking landers, the Voyager probes and the Space Shuttle have been worth it for one, single flight to Mars? That is a question Baxter makes you ask yourself through implication. This novel is one of the finest creations of 1990s science fiction. But I was a bit annoyed when I read it, as I was researching to write a very similar book to this! (aw, shucks) All the flashbacks within the story should have been annoying but Steve Baxter makes it all work very well. In an ideal world with lots of funding, ALL the Apollo lunar missions would have been retained, there would have been a series of Skylab space stations and mankind would have worked and lived on Mars. ALL this before the 21st Century. SIGH...

If Tom Clancy is the "Tom Clancy" of warfare, Baxter may be his equal in Engineering. The book is written in near scholarly text when explaining the nueclear rockets, and chemical propellant vehicles that mankind would have used to go to Mars in the 1980's. That was a turn-off. Another turn-off is the non-chronological sequence the story is told in. The first passages have the crew that is going to Mars on the pad. Then the book retreats from there to when Natalie York, Mission Specialist and one of the many protagonists in the book, decided to become an astronaut. And then it comes back to different points in the Mars Mission inter-mixed with the life stories of the other two Mars explorers going to the Red Planet with her, the bids to build the hardware going on the voyage, the shakeups at NASA, even York's search for an apartment near NASA. It would have been better if it was told from point A to B. I found this to be a terrible way to have to read the book. For instance, you knew the Nueclear rocket program had it's problems before he wrote about them since it was explained earlier in the book.
On the plus side, and there are many plusses, the book explains from an "insider's" viewpoint what these astronauts go through. It isn't pretty. The sterile appearance of the space program is stripped away with broad strokes. These people are street fighters who look at competitiveness as one of the four food groups. The politics of NASA, the in-fighting, the seemingly ordinary choices these men and women made that would effect how history books are written decades later are described in hard-headed, unromantic terms. All at once you are enamored and a little bothered at what is written. "Could it be that superficial and heroic at the same time?" was a question I kept asking myself.
And then there is the subtext of the book. Let's go to Mars. We knew we could do it in the 1970's and the fact that we haven't done it has deposited this country at a destination that is subordinate to its destiny.

Voyage, by Stephen Baxter, offers the intriguing possibility of NASA undertaking a manned mission to Mars in the 1980s instead of building the space shuttle. The book, however, suffers from a couple of flaws.

First, the narrative alternates between the years leading from the Apollo moon landing to the launch of the Mars expedition and the voyage to Mars itself. It is sometimes very hard to keep the two separate stories straight in one's memory. There is also next to nothing about what happens on Mars after the landing.

Second, Baxter totally fails to suggest that doing Mars instead of the shuttle would have any effect on society and history outside of the US space program. This is doubly puzzling because he basis his altered history on a John F. Kennedy having survived Dallas a cripple. (That premise may be one built on quicksand. Recent revelations about JFK's health problems and his private feelings toward space exploration make the idea of his physical survival into the 80s problematic, not to speak of his advocacy of a manned mission to Mars.) Regardless, the survival of JFK to be a kind of gray eminence of the Democratic Party would have been an interesting concept to explore, even without the space theme.

The story also has a bitter sweet air about it. Several Apollo lunar missions, as well as a number of unmanned probes such as the Pioneer and Voyager missions to the Outer Planets are cancelled to pay for sending people to Mars. And there is the faint whiff of melancholy that after humans return from Mars, there might be no further expeditions.

--Mark R. Whittington (...)

As a big proponent of a manned mission to Mars, I looked forward to reading this book. While Baxter's characters showed a lot of promise, the slow pace of the story and lack of any possible conflict failed to keep my interest.

Wow! I really, REALLY enjoyed this book. It is an homage to the Apollo program as much as it is about a manned Mars mission. Baxter very accurately conveys the frustration that so many people feel about how the US space program just seemed to dry up and go away for almost the entire 1970's, and how all of the momentum that the Apollo program generated was just squandered. Page after page after page I wished that reality had been closer to Baxter's vision, but instead we just got a few skylab missions and then years of nothing. This coupled with the fact that any real manned Mars mission is years away was very frustrating!
The book is cleverly structured so that the events leading up to the mission very closely parallel events from the real apollo program. An early disaster with loss of life, the crew selection, the lead-in missions, the selection of the contractors to build the hardware, etc, were all disguised versions of very real events from the 1960's. It was as if Baxter were nodding and winking to fans of the Apollo program.
When one visits either Kennedy Space Center or Johnson Space Center one can see actual, flight-ready Saturn V launch vehicles that were never sent into space(the Saturn V in Huntsville, Alabama is not a flight article but a test article). Looking at those earthbound spacecraft produces similar feelings to reading this book: both make a person feel that the potential of the space program was not lived up to in those decades. Now those Saturn V's are rusting museum pieces, as are hopes for a manned Mars mission anytime soon.

I am relatively new to the world of Stephen Baxter, and I picked a pretty good book to start off my getting to know him, I think. 'Voyage' is not so much science fiction as it is a novel of alternate history, a history I might add actually COULD have happened had NASA made a few better choices in the 70's. There are few moments that I was more proud to be an American than when watching Armstrong & Aldrin walk on the surface of the moon, and I KNOW that feeling would return if we made that leap and went out to mars.
'Voyage' gives us several point-of-view's regarding this undertaking. First off, Kennedy survived his assassination attempt, but sustained a severe injury. We also get the view of the astronauts as they BEGIN the mission in the present, while the rest of the novel skips around to the politics surrounding just WHO will be the first humans on another planet, HOW we'll manage to pay for such a tremendous undertaking and the most important question: just HOW will we be able to pull it all off? Serious questions arise. Methods are tried, some fail, some do not, but it all seems pretty risky--and some even die in the pursuit of an experimental rocket that turns out to be less than reliable.
This is how it COULD have happened. I wish it had. I wish it WOULD. But by the time that eventually happens, most of us might be long gone. Maybe a trip back to the moon would be more appropriate at this point. All I know is that 'Voyage' made me
think a LOT about the space race and where will we be going next should we actually TRY to go ANYWHERE. Fantastic space opera and I honestly believe the reality of this story is almost unheard of in this day and age. The science holds up and even though it's a bit dated because of the time the novel takes place, it just add's to the realism this novel develops throughout. Great story and an even better idea of 'What If?'