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| View Larger Image | Titan | Mass Market Paperbackby Stephen Baxter (Author)
| List Price: | $7.99 | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Mass Market Paperback | | Publisher: | Eos | | Page Count: | 688 Pages | | Publication Date: | November 01, 1998 | | Sales Rank: | 578,357th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780061057137
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Humankind's greatest--and last--adventure! Possible signs of organic life have been found on Titan, Saturn's largest moon. A group of visionaries led by NASA's Paula Benacerraf plan a daring one-way mission that will cost them everything. Taking nearly a decade, the billion-mile voyage includes a "slingshot" transit of Venus, a catastrophic solar storm, and a constant struggle to keep the ship and crew functioning. But it is on the icy surface of Titan itself that the true adventure begins. In the orange methane slush the astronauts will discover the secret of life's origins and reach for a human destiny beyond their wildest dreams. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.0 based on 85 reviews)
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Highly recommended by Daniel Rosenberg (Highland Park, IL United States)  4 Stars
October 16, 2009
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. As some other reviewers have written, it's the closest any of us will ever get to being on Titan. The science seems accurate to me as a layman with a healthy interest in space, and the descriptions of space flight are very well done. The characters aren't the most fascinating I've ever read about, but the two main ones do grow on you, and by the end, you feel some warmth for them. The parts of the book that were least enjoyable were the parts that took place on earth, but I rushed through those and was rewarded by the descriptions of the mission and Titan.
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Excellent & mirrors some of today's politics!! by RobinA (Houston, TX United States)  5 Stars
September 22, 2009
This was an excellent read with a good ending and oddly enough, the politics mentioned in this story are somewhat familiar today altho this book was written in 1997 - weird! It is an "end of the world" type book but with a twist. Anti-space and anti-Nasa creates a USA no longer interested in exploring space. However, the Discovery space ship with six astronauts is sent to Titan to discover life. Science info is well researched re: Nasa, planets, etc - a bit technical in areas, but the characters are believable and worth getting to know. In the end, I was rooting for Paula Benacerraf and Isaac Rosenberg to succeed,.... and they did :)
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Stephen Baxter's Titan - An amazing story by David King (Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States) 4 Stars
August 13, 2008
Not for the faint-hearted or the non-technically-oriented, this is a highly technical, prescient and terrifying believable speculative tale of the failures of the NASA space program and of human civilization but with a positive, amazing central plot of a seemingly doomed and desperate human mission to Saturn's enigmatic moon, Titan. The human characters are numerous and various with the central personalities quite well-drawn and sympathetic. If you ever wanted to know how to survive on a long space voyage and then on the surface of a frigid, hostile world, this is the book. Highly recommended for space buffs, Stephen Baxter does a wonderful job of story-telling with enough technical details to make the settings and events painfully believable.
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Fine early novel by Greg (Australia) 4 Stars
February 24, 2007
Stephen Baxter is now one of the world's best known 'Hard' SF writers. His books are often focused on space travel, exotic physics, astrophysics and cosmology, and dizzying extrapolations into the far future, but this novel is slightly different.
Titan chronicles the human reaction to evidence found by the Huygens probe that life exists on Saturn's largest Moon, Titan. NASA, though decaying and beset by a hostile Whitehouse administration presided over by a Christian fundamentalist president and a overly powerful military establishment ruled by Al Hartle, who sees no value in space exploration, decides to sent a manned mission to Titan to investigate.
The mission begins, and takes a decade to arrive at Titan. Unfortunately in a war back on Earth the Chinese attempt to use an asteroid as a space weapon against the US, with terrible consequences for humanity.
Titan is a very depressing novel in many ways, and tends to lose some of its luster as Baxter uses it as a vehicle to promote some of his very negative views on religion and its relationship to science, particularly in so far as things like creationism are concerned. However, it was an important early demonstration of Baxter's ability to create an interesting and plausible story backed up by good science and a detailed knowledge of spaceflight. The main weakness, as with most of Baxter's works, is the characters are somewhat two-dimensional and are overshadowed by the high-science and high-technology themes which dominate his story arcs. But, in so far as hard SF goes, this is a very enjoyable novel.
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Science Good, Drama Good, Politics Bad, Massive Errors by Dayton L. Kitchens (Norphlet, AR. USA)  1 Stars
June 19, 2006
Titan was great in regards to the science and technology and how it was presented. And the best part, where people with NASA brainstorm how to get a manned mission to Titan by putting pieces together from half a dozen different projects is masterfull.
But the politics and huge errors related to them kill the book.
For one, we have the Titan mission being so popular with the American people that the NASA Administrator gets Time Magazines "Person of the Year" Award. Yet the president, who barely wins kills the space program without any apparent political repercussions.
For another, we have an Air Force pilot who flew one of the original X-15 missions (late 1950s, early 1960s) flying an orbital combat mission some SIXTY years later!! The man would have to be pushing 90 years old!!
Finally, we have NASA, which goes all out to get this mission into space, put five astronauts aboard who are utterly incompatible with each other. Including an annoying pilot who doesn't really have anything to do for the first 7 years of the mission.
And given that NASA doesn't even like to think about sex, I find it difficult to believe they would put two astronauts aboard who are known to all as lesbian lovers.
Incidentally, Baxter doesn't know much about the American political system since he has the American president ban abortion on his FIRST DAY in office. This would be utterly impossible.
And in regards to aforementioned president, he basically wrecks the U.S. yet has hopes of somehow getting a third term as president.
Baxters science appears to be sound. But his terrible lack of consistency and his ham handed at best handling of the political and cultural aspects of the United States really damages what could've been an interesting book.
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