stephen baxter - voyage

i have just finished this book during the weekend, so here's a very brief review. i personally really liked the novel, but i do realize it is not for everybody. it is a very hard sci-fi; a welcome break from the author's grand sprawling space operas (though those are definitely worth a look as well). one could almost say that "voyage" is not a sci-fi, rather a non-fiction account of the post-apollo manned space exploration in an alternate history.

characterization is halfway decent: the characters are not one-dimensional, but i would hardly call them complex, evolving personalities. where this novel really shines is the narrative and the details. the story opens with the launch of the final component of the manned mission to mars. the following chapters are a chronological description of the titular voyage, interspaced with flashback chapters of events leading up to the launch, starting from the apollo 11 moon landing. i found this narrative structure to be quite engaging, even though it does take some of the suspense away (eg. we find out which astronauts were selected for the mars mission from the first page). some of the flashback chapters are excerpts from presidential speeches (eg. an almost word-for-word actual nixon speech), recommendations for congress or newspaper articles, thus giving the novel the illusion of an authentic historical account.

to fully enjoy the novel a brief familiarity with the real history of nasa, the politics of the period and the basic workings of rockets is required; together with the exquisite attention to detail and technical jargon this might be a turn-off for many readers, even fans of the science fiction genre. for example, two characters have a dialog going on for several paragraphs about some NERVA tests, only to clarify what the acronym stands for later and never mention it again in the many discussions about the engine throughout the book (a bit like the custom of academic papers of specifying an acronym only when it is first used in the text). later we are given a description of the workings of this nuclear engine by a character and this can be completely baffling to a reader who does not know what are  turbopumps, combustion chambers or vernier thrusters. the conversations between mission control and the astronauts also contain a lot of technical jargon and it reminded me of the film "apollo 13" which used excerpts from the actual transcripts of the mission (still my favorite space movie; so much better than "gravity"). All these elements made the novel really enjoyable to me, but, again, it's not everybody's cup of tea.

if interested, you can look up a tube video of the mission (called ares mission to mars: voyage) in the space vehicle simulator  "orbiter"; be warned though, the structure of the rocket contains spoilers for astute observers familiar with 70s era hardware. there are also recreations of the mission in "kerbal space program", of course.