Voyage

I suppose I'm glad Stephen Baxter didn't manage to become an astronaut! I think he is still longing to go into space, and his novels give him -and us - the opportunity to go after all.This longing is very obvious in 'Voyage'. Baxter decides to take a crucial point in the history of the U.S. space program - Kennedy's call to go to the moon and Mars. Kennedy here survives the assassination attempt and goes on proclaiming manned space missions. At the end of the sixties, Nixon decides to expand the manned missions to go to Mars as well...A fever possesses NASA. Almost everything goes to Ares - the name for the Mars mission. And almost a generation later, in the mid-eighties, 'man' (i.e. woman) stands on Mars... Ohhh yes, it would have been so nice.The Ares mission to Mars has an expensive price ticket. A lot of other missions have to be cancelled, there is simply not enough money for them in the NASA budget. So, there are never more then just three Apollo missions; there is no space shuttle. Many other missions are cut down: no Magellan to Venus, no Voyagers 1 & 2 to the gas giants. We don't know anything about them that we do know in our own universe.Are we better off in this alternate universe? Maybe not for non-Martian planetary scientists. But by going to Mars so soon, NASA and at least the U.S. commit themselves to the red planet - and maybe other nation will get Mars fever as well, and start lowering their weapon budgets. I suppose NASA in the 'Voyage' universe will get a huge increase in their post-Ares budgetBuy and read this book!

I liked the book a lot; even if I felt, as some others have, that maybe a world with Mariner 10, Viking, Voyager and Hubble is actually a richer one than one with a single-shot Mars mission. Part of his achievement is that he makes you really ask yourself what you'd rather have seen happen.However, I don't think the political mechanism he invents is as plausible as the technology. Others have noted that aspects of the novel draw on Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox's excellent "Apollo". Readers may also like to seek out "Angle of Attack" by Mike Gray, as this book on Harrison "Stormy" Storms of North American appears to have informed the J K Lee character; and "The making of an ex-astronaut" by onetime NASA scientist-astronaut Brian O'Leary, which contributes a couple of threads to the Natalie York character.

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...

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.

I can remember, as a child of 10 or so, watching the ghostly pictures on television of Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the moon. I was hooked on the adventure and became an avid Apollo watcher until December '72 when the last mission flew. There was a lot of speculation that the Americans would follow up their moon triumph with a push at the big one and go to Mars. Despite the good reasons, I was always disappointed that it didn't happen. I'm sure many others were too and, especially if you are one of them, it is therefore with some excitement that you should approach this book. Stephen Baxter has created a wonderful 'could have been' story of the first manned flight to Mars in the mid 1980s. It is all so plausible - and there are even some real life characters. Anyone who has read Andrew Chaikin's "A man on the moon - the voyages of the Apollo astronauts" or Henry Cooper's "Thirteen: The Apollo flight that failed" will find resonances from these factual accounts in Baxter's story. The characters are very well crafted and, after reading the book, you will find it difficult to separate Stone, York and Gershon, Baxter's astronauts, from Armstrong, Conrad, Schmitt and all the others who really did fly in the great adventure. Read this book - a very believable and gripping tale