Titan (Stephen Baxter)

Titan

Author	Stephen Baxter
Country	Great Britain
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Voyager (UK)
Publication date	18 July 1997
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	581 pp (HB)
ISBN	ISBN 0002254247

Alternate cover

Titan is a 1997 science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter. The book depicts a manned mission to Titan — the enigmatic moon of Saturn — which has a thick atmosphere and a chemical makeup that some think may contain the building blocks of life.

Plot summary

Baxter's novel explores a range of possible attitudes toward space exploration and science in the early twenty-first century in which he lays down his concerns about anti-intellectualism and the loss of the pioneering spirit in modern American politics. In Baxter's novel, America is ruled by a fundamentalist Christian president who is so hostile to science that he believes Earth is the centre of the universe and orders the equal treatment of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system in high school curricula. The president orders development of a disease tailored to attack Han Chinese only. China, meanwhile, is engaged in a ferociously determined bid to gain mastery of space. Tensions develop between the two nations and the US military demand that NASA's resources be diverted into defense spending. Amid this ignorance and bellicosity, a small team of scientists must persuade NASA to fund a manned mission to Titan. They do so by recycling decrepit older spacecraft: space shuttles and Apollo re-entry capsules are adjusted to become Titan landers. The mission is feted as NASA's last hurrah. Despite an attempt by an insane US general to destroy the mission, it successfully lifts off. During the six-year journey to Saturn, one crew member dies after a solar storm, but the use of a CELSS greenhouse for life support provides a continuous food supply, and the astronauts rely on vegetables, grain and fruit from the greenhouse as they travel on. Oddly, the CELSS system has been tested on Earth and has worked fairly well. Meanwhile, the Chinese, in order to retaliate for biological attacks by the US, detonate a huge explosion next to an asteroid, with the aim of deflecting it into Earth orbit and threatening the world with targeted precision strikes in the future. Unfortunately, their calculations are wrong, and the asteroid strikes Earth, destroying all life on its surface. The Titan team are the last humans left alive. All they can do is continue their journey to Titan and hope it can sustain life. Many of the team die during the arduous landing procedure, and Titan turns out to be utterly bleak, a freezing, dark hellhole in which purple organic compounds fall like snow from the clouds, and sluggish seas of liquid ethane balefully lap on icy shores. The two surviving team members slowly die, but as they do so, they decide to ensure that life will survive somehow: they take a flask of hardy bacteria and drop it into a lake, in the hope that some form of life will cling on. The novel's final sequence depicts the two crew members bafflingly reincarnated on Titan several billion years in the future. The sun has entered its red giant phase, warming the Saturnian system so that life, in the form of strange, intelligent beetle-like creatures, has evolved on Titan. The astronauts watch as the beetles build a fleet of spacecraft to colonize new star systems before the sun boils off the surface of the moon as it continues to expand. Life has endured.

Literary significance & criticism

The novel's final chapter has been heavily criticized for excessive implausibilty, but it can be read as deliberate wishful thinking: it epitomises Baxter's moral that if the human race is to survive indefinitely, it must become more proactive in its approach to space travel, and not resort to shallow militarism or nationalist isolationism. The Titanian beetles represent Baxter's dream of what the human race should be. Conceivably, the final chapter can be read as the dying dream of the astronauts, rather than a realistic evocation of Titan's future. The concept of seeding life on other worlds has previously been explored by James Blish in his Pantropy short stories collected in the book The seedling stars, where humans are genetically engineered to colonize different, even hostile planets. The prologue of one of these stories ("Surface Tension") is actually quite similar to "Titan": It tells how the few survivors of a crashed pantropy starship create intelligent microscopic lifeforms in the sweetwater puddles of the only continent of the ocean world they crashed on before they die, using their own genetic material as a source. The story then goes on to tell how the microscopic aquatic "humans" over many seasons get to dominate their habitat, decipher parts of the message left to them by their creators, invent new technology and finally construct a two inch wooden "spaceship" to overcome their puddle's surface tension. Another story suggests that after several millions of years of seeding modified humans to other worlds, the original human form has become obsolete and Earth is just an unimportant desert planet.

Allusions/references to actual history, geography and current science

The depiction of Titan's surface is speculation based on respectable scientific data that was available in 1997. However, the Cassini probe's study of Titan, which began in 2005, has recently borne out some of the ideas from Baxter's book; in particular, there do appear to be liquid lakes on the moon.

See also

• Return from the Stars