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A review by toastberg
Titan by Stephen Baxter
1.0
I'm a late comer to this series, but I absolutely loved Voyage and was thrilled when I found out that it was part of a trilogy. Immediately I jumped into Titan, and almost immediately had misgivings. Nevertheless, I pushed my way through, and this review is my warning to anybody in the same boat: Just quit. The story doesn't get better. The implausibilities are never resolved. There's no redeeming grace waiting at the end. The whole book starts off crappy, and ends even worse.
Voyage was a compelling and realistic take on an alternate history culminating in a crewed mission to Mars in the 80's--so I expected that this book would pick up where that one left off. I was woefully wrong as it turns out. Titan is an alternate future, written in the late 90's about the 2000's to 2010's. And it is *painfully* bad.
Among its many, many sins is falling into the trap of writing about a future that is too near to the present. Baxter writes about the early 2000's as featuring animated tattoos, ubiquitous virtual reality, self-driving cars, and a caricature of a right-wing populist that somehow manages to look ridiculous even in a post-2016 world. And it's not just the technology that is painfully out of place, his portrayal of the younger generation in the book has an overwhelming "old man yells at cloud" flavor to it.
But beyond that, for a book that is ostensibly hard science fiction, the core of the book centers around a mission that is laughably implausible from every perspective. And even if you get beyond the insanely inadequate exposition, immediately after the launch of the mission there is an utterly absurd sabotage attempt with absolutely no reasonable motive and with zero consequences for either the protagonists or antagonists. And it doesn't get better from there: each subsequent scene just piles on to the absurdity of the plot, while being monumentally depressing to boot. Scenes seem to be thrown in for no other purpose than to make the reader miserable. Which, done properly, can work great! Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and more recently Neal Stephenson's Seveneves manage to make that trope work. Titan utterly fails to do so. It's a miserable read with no redeeming qualities.
Every single character is eminently hateable, the plot is absurd, the realism is lacking, there's no unifying theme or purpose, and to top it all off, it ends with a completely incongruous Deus Ex Machina.
In short, I would wholeheartedly recommend that everybody skip this book entirely, even if you enjoy other books from Baxter and especially if you enjoyed his book Voyage.
Voyage was a compelling and realistic take on an alternate history culminating in a crewed mission to Mars in the 80's--so I expected that this book would pick up where that one left off. I was woefully wrong as it turns out. Titan is an alternate future, written in the late 90's about the 2000's to 2010's. And it is *painfully* bad.
Among its many, many sins is falling into the trap of writing about a future that is too near to the present. Baxter writes about the early 2000's as featuring animated tattoos, ubiquitous virtual reality, self-driving cars, and a caricature of a right-wing populist that somehow manages to look ridiculous even in a post-2016 world. And it's not just the technology that is painfully out of place, his portrayal of the younger generation in the book has an overwhelming "old man yells at cloud" flavor to it.
But beyond that, for a book that is ostensibly hard science fiction, the core of the book centers around a mission that is laughably implausible from every perspective. And even if you get beyond the insanely inadequate exposition, immediately after the launch of the mission there is an utterly absurd sabotage attempt with absolutely no reasonable motive and with zero consequences for either the protagonists or antagonists. And it doesn't get better from there: each subsequent scene just piles on to the absurdity of the plot, while being monumentally depressing to boot. Scenes seem to be thrown in for no other purpose than to make the reader miserable. Which, done properly, can work great! Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, and more recently Neal Stephenson's Seveneves manage to make that trope work. Titan utterly fails to do so. It's a miserable read with no redeeming qualities.
Every single character is eminently hateable, the plot is absurd, the realism is lacking, there's no unifying theme or purpose, and to top it all off, it ends with a completely incongruous Deus Ex Machina.
In short, I would wholeheartedly recommend that everybody skip this book entirely, even if you enjoy other books from Baxter and especially if you enjoyed his book Voyage.