This was a very interesting book. Sort of a combination procedural/political drama. It takes a very deep look into the internals of NASA and the politicing that goes on, with the actual spaceflight coming in almost second place. I realize that this is fiction, but it's very easy to imagine this is a non-fiction work.

How can a book with such an interesting premise be so freaking boring?

It seems particularly appropriate this week during the 30th Anniversary of the moon landing that I’m reviewing this particular book. Voyage is an alternative history exploring what might have happened if, following the moon landings, instead of developing the Space Shuttle, NASA had concentrated its resources to landing a man on Mars.

The book starts when Neil Armstrong stands on the moon and finishes in the 80s when NASA sends a mission to Mars.

The result is a fascinating but flawed look into what might have been. Baxter has obviously done a prodigious amount of research into NASA. Reading this book you learn a lot about the culture, language and details of space exploration.

Unfortunately it is these very details which work against the book as a story. You probably won’t be surprised to discover that astronauts use a lot of acronyms. In keeping with the realistic tone of the book, so does Baxter. Which means he has to explain them all to us.

All the description and explanation slows the actual story down to a crawl. While I found the details of the space flights and training very interesting, I didn’t really connect with any of the characters in the book till around the half way mark.

This is a shame since once I had made that connection (created by a specific traumatic event) I found that the story picked up pace and became much more gripping to read.

A second problem is the sheer number of characters in this book. Covering 2 decades as it does, it flits between many viewpoints never giving you very long to learn about any individual character, apart from the one central character who I found to be intensely whiney and annoying.

Despite these flaws I still think this is an amazing book and well worth reading. It does an excellent job of showing the sheer scale of difficulty that is involved in putting man on any other planet. Baxter also debates the wisdom of such stunt missions or indeed space travel at all, letting each side put forward their arguments without heavy bias.

Although labelled as the first in a trilogy, the books ended up being unrelated except for the main concept- an alternate NASA timeline.
Once again, Baxter does a great job of creating an alternate (and in some cases, massively long timeline) about the different possibilities of an alternate NASA created and influenced by major events in the books.

The seeds to all good literature lies in two words : what if ? Take an occurrence in human history and imagine an alternative outcome to it and voila ! you have material for a good book in your hands. These flights of fantasy are what makes alternative history books some of my favorite reads.

Here is an America where JFK survived the assassination attempt. Shattered and bound to his wheelchair, he urges the space program onward. A world where the Nixon administration did not drop the guillotine on the manned Mars program and finally in 1985, the USA lands a trio of people on Mars. I found this premise very very interesting and Baxter did deliver a colorful roller coaster ride in all of these 600 pages ! Much more than telling the story of three astronauts who go to Mars, the author here focuses on NASA. This then means the focus is on this technological organization and how it tides over many an obstacle in putting men on Mars. The human factor of this novel is quite unmissable and perhaps its biggest strength. With such a backdrop, it would have been easy for the author to slip into technical jargon and give the reader a long technical manual (read Tom Clancy !) and put his characters on the Mars. Baxter however goes the other way. He tells us of the men and women who build the launch vehicles. Those who obsessively pursue this one goal of pushing beyond the envelope of technology, the astronauts who lay down their lives for the bigger goals of technocracy and many more unnamed faces intricately linked with the organization called NASA.The novel spans the story of the first such manned space flight which lands on the red planet and how the mission comes to be. There is jargon yes but the author keeps this to understandable levels and the focus is mainly on people and circumstances. As befits a novel of such scope, the focus is not placed on a few individuals but more on an ensemble cast.

The brightest flash of brilliance in the book is in the character named Joseph Muldoon. He is the equivalent of Edwin Aldrin in real life and perhaps the most pivotal character who drives the story forward. I liked him precisely for his all-American nature and the way he bulldozes his way through all the garbage to get to what matters : completion of the mission. Through the span of this tale careers rise and fall, people come and go and politics keeps poking its fingers in places it has no reason to and all this makes the story a great deal interesting. There is also the story of the three-men crew : Stone, York and Gershon who finally make it to the moon. When I was reaching the end of the book it stuck me quite odd that way back in 1980's it would have been rather impossible for such a crew to break free of the barriers of orthodoxy and prejudice to fly out of Earth orbit. Wondering why ? Read on and find out for I ain't letting the cat out of its bag where its all cozy and comfy !

It took me a long time to finish this book. I couldn't find a logical reason for this as I moved at quite a stiff pace but still the book mocked me with its size of unread pages. The interest level for sci-fi in my reading list is also steadily climbing. Earlier I read up on Asimov and grumbled my way through Heinlein and applauded my way through Clarke but now this book makes me want to read more of sci-fi ! Recommended !

I can't even classify this as Science Fiction... this is Engineering Fiction. Eng-Fi, is that a thing? It should be.

Anyway, I ate it up: an alt-history take on how the US might've gotten to Mars in the 80s if it had taken that direction right after Apollo, instead of the Shuttle and Space Station and Hubble and the variety of planetary probes we've built instead. And Baxter doesn't sell this as a unequivocally better direction, either -- the story's not that simple-minded, not at all.

Also, space geeks might enjoy this animation of the proposed vehicle methodology: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrbvM5HuQRE

Very interesting book of what could have been. Absolutely love Baxter's technical approach to science fiction!