warpus
Sommerswerd asked me to change this
While cottaging I read through the entirety of Titan (1997) by Stephen Baxter, which I thought was the sequel to Voyage.
1. It's not a sequel, although these 2 books along with Moonseed are frequently referred to as the NASA trilogy. They aren't a trilogy. The books are not only standalone, they also each exist in a very different universe. What's a bit confusing is that Titan seems to pick up where Voyage left off if you look at the year alone. So hey, it's often called a trilogy, the second novel is set right after the first one - I went into this thing thinking it's a sequel.. then got real confused when Titan started mentioning a program that was cancelled fairly early on in Voyage. Huh? So I googled it and GODDAMIT, a part of TItan was spoiled for me - basically the chapter I was about to read.
Ah well. Better marketing was definitely needed here *shakes fist at the man*. These 3 books are connected but not in a traditional "this is a trilogy i.e. 3 books that follow each other" sort of way. These 3 novels are all "what if?" stories that take NASA in a different direction, due to some set of historical events (such as JFK surviving in Voyage)
2. Baxter learned a lot of lessons after the failures of Voyage. Virtually every single point of contention I had with Voyage is addressed in Titan:
- The story is more or less linear and doesn't jump around the timeline like a crackhead anymore.
- NASA bureaucracy plays a part but doesn't take up 75% of the novel. The balance is improved bigtime.
- The story is better balanced in that each part of the journey to Titan gets a chunk of the text. Instead of reading about NASA engineers and managers arguing about design specs for 300 pages, you first read a bit about why they'd want to go to Titan in the first place, then the mission pitch and acceptance by the big wigs, then a bit about the tech to get them there, then a bit about the voyage ,then the landing, exploration, etc. Everything flows a lot better and gives you more to look forward to as you're reading.
3. It seems that somebody sat Baxter down and said: "We liked Voyage, but make it easier to read. Hollywood it up a bit!" and he took that advice and ran with it. Titan is a very different novel from Voyage, in a sense. Voyage reads as a very realistic sort of scenario that could have actually happened, wheras Titan is more like a hollywood movie with several unrealistic parts.. One of which being the election of a nationalist isolationist populist American president who.. starts building a wall on the border of Mexico, kicking out immigrants, he puts up tariffs and shuts down global trade.. defunds many American agencies, even throws around plans to take over the Panama Canal. America in this novel goes anti-science to a degree. Huh? Did I say unrealistic? It turns out that these are actually some of the more realistic things Baxter came up with, in terms of what we're actually experiencing today.. I mean, in the novel Seattle goes as far as banning telescope use, that's how anti-science the country gets.. Like I said, somebody told him to hollywood it up.. and he did. If the nationalist president stuff didn't line up so well with reality I'd have been rolling my eyes at a lot of it. but it made it more engaging to read instead, at least the parts that line up with reality to some degree.
4. A lot of stuff just goes way overboard. There is a Chinese astronaut who plays only one role in the novel. She's gradually introduced to the story, and you think she'll end up on Titan too later on maybe.. but nope. Her role in the novel is kind of.. dumb? It all sort of comes together at the end and you realize why the story had to go in this direction, but in the moment it just seems like a waste of a promising character. It would have been super interesting to read about a parallel Chinese mission to Titan. But the more I read the more I realized this is not at all what Baxter was setting up. There are a couple other weirdly written characters in this novel. I found the characters in Voyage a lot more realistic. In Titan there is an American pilot who reads like.. I don't know what to describe him as. A cartoony one track villain. It's like Baxter had 4 guys watching him write this thing, making sure that he produced something that was significantly over the top.
5. The ending was my favourite part of this whole novel. I did not like where the novel was going until I figured out where it was actually going. What a nice surprise! The ending was in some ways reminiscent of Proxima/Ultima, although you can definitely see how far Baxter had improved when it comes to characterization when you compare these sets of novels, written about 17 years apart. Voyage and Titan seem clunky in many ways, compared to Proxima/Ultima, which feel a lot tighter as a story and package. Either way, the ending of Titan was great and I'm glad the author took the story there. It made me want to read more books in this universe, but I know that will never happen.
6. I said that Voyage and Titan are very different novels, in a sense. In a sense they are also very similar, in that they follow a sort of similar framework. The setup is "Some event caused NASA to do something differently", and the rest of both novels extrapolates from there. In very different ways, but there are some similarities there in how he was thinking about the stories and putting some things together. In a way you can think of these novels of having a similar spiritual setup. In this sense it makes sense to call these novels a trilogy, although there's got to be a better word we can use in this case. "Trilogy" will make people think that the books are sequels of each other. They aren't that at all.
I will order Moonseed and read that next, to see what else Baxter can do with this sort of setup, and what lessons he learned while writing Titan. I hope that the 3rd novel is an improvement over the previous 2, the same way Titan is an improvement over Voyage. Let's be clear though, these are novels with many faults. They aren't works to be worshipped. They are average novels, pretty much. Baxter's prose is easy and fun to read and that pushes these novels over the edge for me, and like I said I enjoy this sort of premise. This "trilogy" will find its place in my new home library.
I also ended up reading New Pompeii (2016) by Daniel Godfrey. Yep, I read two whole novels while at the cottage, the most I've read in years. It was glorious. I really enjoyed time spent like that, I hope it pushes me to read more frequently when I'm not vacationing.
New Pompeii was a fun read, although it's incredibly short. Yeah, it's what, 450 pages or so? But I swear each page has like 30% of the content of Baxter's Titan. The fontsize is larger, the margins are larger, and every 4 pages you run into a new chapter. Some "chapters" are just one page long. Such a huge difference from what I went through reading Titan. Is this how novels are written for the kids these days? Easier to approach and easier to read?
New Pompeii presents a fascinating premise - what if a company figured out how to pull matter from the past, giving humanity a near unlimited energy source? What if that company then went a bit rogue and started pulling in objects from the past as well? What if they pulled the town of Pompeii into the present, right before the volcano erupted? And what if there's more going on behind the scenes than we thought?
It was a page turner for sure, a well thought out story, fun well written characters, an engaging prose, and a satisfying ending. It just felt so short though, like Godfrey was writing this for people with super short attention span syndrome. More meat was needed! The book basically only has time to take you through the setup, the initial introduction to the premise, and a somewhat straightforward crisis. It's surprising in that there's stuff going on behind the scenes you wouldn't expect (or maybe you would?), but as you read you realize there's only so many pages left to complete the story. You know there aren't going to be any fancy twists or side stories. There's only so many pages to tell the story you're being told. It's like you're on one of those 3 minute long rides. To contrast this novel with Voyage, it's basically the exact opposite sort of literary setup. Voyage has time to go all over the place and do all sorts of things. You read and think "omg how many more pages until they figure out the boosters, when do we actually fly to Mars?" New Pompeii on the other hand takes you through the motions BLAM SLAM THANK you mam. Not much room for a reacharound or any other surprises. It takes you through the story and that's that. It being a time travel story, things get a bit confusing in the final act (I had to google to make sure I fully understood everything) but it seems that this could have been a much beefier story with a lot more interesting prose fleshing stuff out. Instead we just got the bare bones. There is a sequel that I will probably pick up, but yeah, I read this whole novel in basically 1 day, sitting in a comfy chair by the dock, while I swatted away mosquitos and black flies.
The third novel I brought with me to the cottage was The Long Earth (2012) by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. I got about 70 pages into this novel before we had to pack up and head back home. Finally a book written for humans who can handle a bit of verbose prose, although it's not like this book is heavy. It reads very well, the pages flow. Lots of stuff happens on the pages you read. But you get the sense that the authors give you a decent amount of benefit of the doubt. i.e. that you can read and follow a story with more than 200 words in a chapter. I wish New Pompeii had done that.
The premise here is that some guy figured out how to build a very simple machine that teleports you to "the next Earth over" in some sort of a multiverse. There's a chain of Earths apparently, and if you have a potato and a couple spare parts from radio shack, you can easily build this device and teleport from Earth to Earth. Some guy posts the schematics of this machine online and that's when the fun (?) begins. I'm really digging the prose of Pratchett and Baxter. This is my first time reading anything by Pratchett and I'm a fan already. And Baxter of course I already knew I'd like, and this being a 2012 novel he seems to have learned a whole crapload of lessons from his Voyage days.
I apologize about the wall of text. I'm pretty excited I've managed to read 2 books in a week's time, and am starting a third. I haven't done that in years. And yes, I said potato. An actual potato. There is even a drawing of one on the first page. This is the sort of silliness I can get behind. I am 95% sure I will be buying the sequel.
1. It's not a sequel, although these 2 books along with Moonseed are frequently referred to as the NASA trilogy. They aren't a trilogy. The books are not only standalone, they also each exist in a very different universe. What's a bit confusing is that Titan seems to pick up where Voyage left off if you look at the year alone. So hey, it's often called a trilogy, the second novel is set right after the first one - I went into this thing thinking it's a sequel.. then got real confused when Titan started mentioning a program that was cancelled fairly early on in Voyage. Huh? So I googled it and GODDAMIT, a part of TItan was spoiled for me - basically the chapter I was about to read.
Ah well. Better marketing was definitely needed here *shakes fist at the man*. These 3 books are connected but not in a traditional "this is a trilogy i.e. 3 books that follow each other" sort of way. These 3 novels are all "what if?" stories that take NASA in a different direction, due to some set of historical events (such as JFK surviving in Voyage)
2. Baxter learned a lot of lessons after the failures of Voyage. Virtually every single point of contention I had with Voyage is addressed in Titan:
- The story is more or less linear and doesn't jump around the timeline like a crackhead anymore.
- NASA bureaucracy plays a part but doesn't take up 75% of the novel. The balance is improved bigtime.
- The story is better balanced in that each part of the journey to Titan gets a chunk of the text. Instead of reading about NASA engineers and managers arguing about design specs for 300 pages, you first read a bit about why they'd want to go to Titan in the first place, then the mission pitch and acceptance by the big wigs, then a bit about the tech to get them there, then a bit about the voyage ,then the landing, exploration, etc. Everything flows a lot better and gives you more to look forward to as you're reading.
3. It seems that somebody sat Baxter down and said: "We liked Voyage, but make it easier to read. Hollywood it up a bit!" and he took that advice and ran with it. Titan is a very different novel from Voyage, in a sense. Voyage reads as a very realistic sort of scenario that could have actually happened, wheras Titan is more like a hollywood movie with several unrealistic parts.. One of which being the election of a nationalist isolationist populist American president who.. starts building a wall on the border of Mexico, kicking out immigrants, he puts up tariffs and shuts down global trade.. defunds many American agencies, even throws around plans to take over the Panama Canal. America in this novel goes anti-science to a degree. Huh? Did I say unrealistic? It turns out that these are actually some of the more realistic things Baxter came up with, in terms of what we're actually experiencing today.. I mean, in the novel Seattle goes as far as banning telescope use, that's how anti-science the country gets.. Like I said, somebody told him to hollywood it up.. and he did. If the nationalist president stuff didn't line up so well with reality I'd have been rolling my eyes at a lot of it. but it made it more engaging to read instead, at least the parts that line up with reality to some degree.
4. A lot of stuff just goes way overboard. There is a Chinese astronaut who plays only one role in the novel. She's gradually introduced to the story, and you think she'll end up on Titan too later on maybe.. but nope. Her role in the novel is kind of.. dumb? It all sort of comes together at the end and you realize why the story had to go in this direction, but in the moment it just seems like a waste of a promising character. It would have been super interesting to read about a parallel Chinese mission to Titan. But the more I read the more I realized this is not at all what Baxter was setting up. There are a couple other weirdly written characters in this novel. I found the characters in Voyage a lot more realistic. In Titan there is an American pilot who reads like.. I don't know what to describe him as. A cartoony one track villain. It's like Baxter had 4 guys watching him write this thing, making sure that he produced something that was significantly over the top.
5. The ending was my favourite part of this whole novel. I did not like where the novel was going until I figured out where it was actually going. What a nice surprise! The ending was in some ways reminiscent of Proxima/Ultima, although you can definitely see how far Baxter had improved when it comes to characterization when you compare these sets of novels, written about 17 years apart. Voyage and Titan seem clunky in many ways, compared to Proxima/Ultima, which feel a lot tighter as a story and package. Either way, the ending of Titan was great and I'm glad the author took the story there. It made me want to read more books in this universe, but I know that will never happen.
6. I said that Voyage and Titan are very different novels, in a sense. In a sense they are also very similar, in that they follow a sort of similar framework. The setup is "Some event caused NASA to do something differently", and the rest of both novels extrapolates from there. In very different ways, but there are some similarities there in how he was thinking about the stories and putting some things together. In a way you can think of these novels of having a similar spiritual setup. In this sense it makes sense to call these novels a trilogy, although there's got to be a better word we can use in this case. "Trilogy" will make people think that the books are sequels of each other. They aren't that at all.
I will order Moonseed and read that next, to see what else Baxter can do with this sort of setup, and what lessons he learned while writing Titan. I hope that the 3rd novel is an improvement over the previous 2, the same way Titan is an improvement over Voyage. Let's be clear though, these are novels with many faults. They aren't works to be worshipped. They are average novels, pretty much. Baxter's prose is easy and fun to read and that pushes these novels over the edge for me, and like I said I enjoy this sort of premise. This "trilogy" will find its place in my new home library.
I also ended up reading New Pompeii (2016) by Daniel Godfrey. Yep, I read two whole novels while at the cottage, the most I've read in years. It was glorious. I really enjoyed time spent like that, I hope it pushes me to read more frequently when I'm not vacationing.
New Pompeii was a fun read, although it's incredibly short. Yeah, it's what, 450 pages or so? But I swear each page has like 30% of the content of Baxter's Titan. The fontsize is larger, the margins are larger, and every 4 pages you run into a new chapter. Some "chapters" are just one page long. Such a huge difference from what I went through reading Titan. Is this how novels are written for the kids these days? Easier to approach and easier to read?
New Pompeii presents a fascinating premise - what if a company figured out how to pull matter from the past, giving humanity a near unlimited energy source? What if that company then went a bit rogue and started pulling in objects from the past as well? What if they pulled the town of Pompeii into the present, right before the volcano erupted? And what if there's more going on behind the scenes than we thought?
It was a page turner for sure, a well thought out story, fun well written characters, an engaging prose, and a satisfying ending. It just felt so short though, like Godfrey was writing this for people with super short attention span syndrome. More meat was needed! The book basically only has time to take you through the setup, the initial introduction to the premise, and a somewhat straightforward crisis. It's surprising in that there's stuff going on behind the scenes you wouldn't expect (or maybe you would?), but as you read you realize there's only so many pages left to complete the story. You know there aren't going to be any fancy twists or side stories. There's only so many pages to tell the story you're being told. It's like you're on one of those 3 minute long rides. To contrast this novel with Voyage, it's basically the exact opposite sort of literary setup. Voyage has time to go all over the place and do all sorts of things. You read and think "omg how many more pages until they figure out the boosters, when do we actually fly to Mars?" New Pompeii on the other hand takes you through the motions BLAM SLAM THANK you mam. Not much room for a reacharound or any other surprises. It takes you through the story and that's that. It being a time travel story, things get a bit confusing in the final act (I had to google to make sure I fully understood everything) but it seems that this could have been a much beefier story with a lot more interesting prose fleshing stuff out. Instead we just got the bare bones. There is a sequel that I will probably pick up, but yeah, I read this whole novel in basically 1 day, sitting in a comfy chair by the dock, while I swatted away mosquitos and black flies.
The third novel I brought with me to the cottage was The Long Earth (2012) by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. I got about 70 pages into this novel before we had to pack up and head back home. Finally a book written for humans who can handle a bit of verbose prose, although it's not like this book is heavy. It reads very well, the pages flow. Lots of stuff happens on the pages you read. But you get the sense that the authors give you a decent amount of benefit of the doubt. i.e. that you can read and follow a story with more than 200 words in a chapter. I wish New Pompeii had done that.
The premise here is that some guy figured out how to build a very simple machine that teleports you to "the next Earth over" in some sort of a multiverse. There's a chain of Earths apparently, and if you have a potato and a couple spare parts from radio shack, you can easily build this device and teleport from Earth to Earth. Some guy posts the schematics of this machine online and that's when the fun (?) begins. I'm really digging the prose of Pratchett and Baxter. This is my first time reading anything by Pratchett and I'm a fan already. And Baxter of course I already knew I'd like, and this being a 2012 novel he seems to have learned a whole crapload of lessons from his Voyage days.
I apologize about the wall of text. I'm pretty excited I've managed to read 2 books in a week's time, and am starting a third. I haven't done that in years. And yes, I said potato. An actual potato. There is even a drawing of one on the first page. This is the sort of silliness I can get behind. I am 95% sure I will be buying the sequel.
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