Voyage
by Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter is one author who is improving with every book he writes. His earlier books like Raft were good 'hard' SF books but tend to have rather wooden characters or situations that just seem to happen. But lately, his writing has improved and he has gained a lot of attention when he released The Time Ships which is his sequel to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine. His skill in writing has not deserted him with the next book he wrote, Voyage.

Voyage is, at its core, an 'alternate-history' book. For those not familiar with the term, an alternate-history book is one where the author posits a situation where some historical character or situation turned out differently and goes on to create a world based on that changed situation (i.e., what is Hitler had won the war). In Voyage, Baxter change is this: What if Kennedy had survived the assassination attempt and went on to promote the idea of a manned mission to Mars?

Based on that scenario, Baxter goes on to describe, in excellent detail, what happens. NASA, already winding down from the Apollo missions to the moon and looking for the 'next giant step' is organised to plan and produce a manned mission to Mars. In real life, NASA goes on to produce various unmanned mission to the outer planets (Voyager, Viking, etc.) as well as the space shuttle. In Baxter's universe, where budged cuts still loom, virtually all unmanned missions are canceled or redirected to act as pathfinders for the manned Mars mission.

In the book, Baxter follows the lives of several people, which is unusual. Baxter's previous books usually have one viewpoint character. In Voyage, he gives us Joe Muldoon, the second man to walk on the moon (instead of 'Buzz' Aldrin) and who later becomes the man in charge of the Mars mission, Natalie York, a geologist who becomes the first woman astronaut in space, and a host of other characters from NASA directors to other astronauts and space-craft designers.

This huge cast, while somewhat difficult at times to keep track of, give Baxter a chance to 'show off' the technological and physical difficulties encountered in actually preparing and sending a mission to Mars. From the design of the MEM (Mars Excursion Module) to the development of the NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application), the training of the astronauts to the political and budget battles behind the scenes.

This book is highly technical, especially during technical meetings to discuss disasters (yes, as in real life, this NASA also encounters disasters) but even then, it is lucid enough to allow even non-technical people to understand roughly what happened.

In short, this is a remarkable and marvelous book and highly recommended. After reading it, I felt convinced that if things had turned out differently, we could have gone to Mars in 1985. But at what price? In the book, the Voyager missions, Viking, even the Hubble Space Telescope are gone, their budgets 'sucked' in the Mars mission. Would it have been better to have gone to Mars but not know what the unmanned missions did show us about the other planets? I really don't know. Read the book and think about it.

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Voyage by Stephen Baxter

Voyage
by Stephen Baxter