Titan (Stephen Baxter)
Titan is a 1997 science fiction novel by Stephen Baxter. The book depicts a manned mission to the enigmatic moon of Saturn, which has a thick atmosphere and a chemical makeup that some think may contain the building blocks of life.
Synopsis
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. 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 defence 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.
Meanwhile, the Chinese, in order to demonstrate their mastery, 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 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 methane 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 freezing methane sea, 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 goes nova. Life has endured.
Interpretation
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.