Synopsis
Creates a recent past in which President Kennedy survives an assassination attempt to set in motion the next great NASA mission, a manned voyage to Mars, in a story of NASA's detailed plans to visit the red planet--if they had ever been realized.
Reviews
With just a little bit of alternate history, Baxter's excellent what-if novel about a 1986 Mars landing accomplishes its mission. The premise is brilliant: at the time of the Apollo moon landing, President Nixon authorized a Space Task Group to define the post-Apollo role of NASA. In real life, Nixon's directive in effect ended manned space exploration in favor of the Shuttle program; in Baxter's novel, thanks to one major change in history, the green light is given for a manned Mars mission, the Ares program. Seen primarily through the eyes of Natalie York, the geologist on the mission as well as the first women in space, the road from Apollo to Ares is potholed with bureaucratic battles, technical challenges, an Apollo XIII-like disaster and constant fretting about the inevitability (and necessity) of sacrificing lives to advance the cause of science. Baxter, whose recent works include a wildly imagined sequel to The Time Machine (The Time Ships), peoples his story with main characters who are as authentic as his science. By contrast, the supporting characters-notably an ex-NASA administrator who gets religion-are sketchy and barely integrated with the plot. Even so, there's plenty of imagination on display here-and research, too, as Baxter invents not only a credible mission to Mars but also a credible technical, political and personal history behind it. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Tom Clancy meets Tom Wolfe as newcomer Baxter crams a shifting cast of dozens into this obsessively researched revision of the American space program, the payoff for which is a manned landing on Mars. Back in the late '60s, with Kennedy dead and Nixon in the White House, the country's appetite for interplanetary exploration waned. The next step after the Apollo missions was a voyage to Mars, but NASA was pulled back. Baxter imagines what might have happened if Kennedy had lived and cajoled the nation into visiting the Red Planet. He anchors his relentlessly propulsive narrative on three characters: Gregory Dana, a scientist and concentration camp survivor who detests the German rocket scientists' affection for Big Science, preferring a more elegant (and less costly) route to Mars; Ralph Gershon, an African-American astronaut on the Mars missions; and Natalie York, a geologist who escapes two importunate lovers--one a nuclear rocket scientist, the other an astronaut--to make her awkward way Marsward. The story deftly incorporates the history of the actual Apollo missions, making the mission to Mars seem a natural outgrowth of the moon landings. Indeed, the mission ultimately ends up looking a lot like the Moon program: York, Gershon, and the third astronaut, mission commander Phil Stone, are stuffed into a rickety can for the long journey, then blasted into space. The author does a nice job of focusing on his three astronauts' individual experiences of the trip. Perhaps more dazzling than the voyage, though, is the imagined high tech that gets Americans to Mars. Baxter adroitly passes off science fiction as (detailed) science fact. Technophiles will find this endlessly appealing; sci-fi devotees will appreciate the sly Star Trek and 2001 references. For a little tragic juice, there's even a fair emulation of the Apollo 13 accident, though with decidedly different results. A wonderful, patriotic tale of lost possibility. Calling Ron Howard. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
In this alternative history, John Kennedy survived while Jacqueline didn't, and the Kennedy Space Center is named for her. The novel begins with astronauts blasting off on a 1986 mission to Mars in Ares, with two men and a woman at the controls. Masterfully and in great detail, Baxter tells what it feels like, smells like, and sounds like to be aboard a spacecraft. The narrative then jumps back to 1969 and continues to shift back and forth throughout the novel?over 500 pages of flashbacks through the 1970s and 1980s, including conversations between Nixon and Kennedy and side plots and characters galore, leading up to the Ares Mars mission. Although Baxter offers a great deal of background information, his story is nevertheless disjointed, and the characters never quite come to life. Not an essential purchase.?Shirley Gibson Coleman, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., Mich.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
