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This time on Titan...

a book review by Eric Jackson

Titan: A Tale of Cataclysmic Discovery

by Ben Bova

Tor, New York (2006)

418 pp, $7.99 in paperback

ISBN-13: 978--0-765-34315-4

Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, is a water planet, or to be more precise, an ice-covered world. From NASA's surveys it is believed to have tides, an atmosphere, volcanism and complex hydrocarbons, ingredients that suggest the possibility of life as we know it. Maybe that's why it has been the setting for a lot of science fiction works.

Recall that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. masterpiece, which might belong on the science fiction shelf or might belong with the philosophy books, Sirens of Titan. An astronaut visiting the place encountered the Tralthamadorians, a long lived and highly advanced alien race and learned that life on Earth and humanity were created by spores sent out by those beings, who were stranded on Titan by a malfunctioning space ship, which in a relative blink of a Tralthamadorian eye evolved into spacefaring humanity so that this astronaut would visit Titan with an inconsequential (to him) strip of metal aboard his spacecraft that turned out to be precisely the spare part that the Tralthamadorians needed to fix their vehicle and be on their way. Said astronaut, duly impressed, went home to found The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. (God doesn't care about sin or virtue, has no position on abortion or any of that --- he just wanted that spare part, got it and is now out of here.)

Recall the movie Outland, with Sean Connery the space marshall taking on a ruthless if stupid drug ring at a mining operation on Titan. Think of High Noon set in a precarious habitat on Titan instead of in the Wild West and you have the plot of that fun if not totally brilliant flick.

Recall the roles that Titan plays in several of Arthur C. Clarke's novels, and in countless other novels and shorter works by different writers. Titan's tantalizing possibilities lend themselves well to all sorts of stories.

Ah, but Ben Bova is a grand master of "hard" science fiction, not a Hollywood hack writer or that sort of grand philosopher who uses a "sci fi" backdrop for deep social satire. He's won the Hugo six times, and is past president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. He came up after the "Golden Age," when John C. Campbell imposed literary quality standards as well as requirements of scientific plausibility on what had been mainly a juvenile space opera pulp genre, during a time when hard science fiction --- stories about the science --- seemed to be in eclipse due to a revolution led by the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin and Harlan Ellison that set literature about more universal themes into other worldly or otherwise speculative contexts.

Titan is a multi-threaded tale of a space habitat with a population of some 10,000 exiled misfits and a much smaller contingent of scientists orbiting Titan and studying this and that. It's a tale of a monomaniacally obsessed scientific administrator and a wayward subordinate who goes off on her own to make a startling discovery, which turns out to have much farther-reaching implications than she first suspected. It's a tale of a slimy power-mad politician promising the electorate fabulous wealth. It's a tale of a feminist revolt, shorn from the current US context of abortion politics. It's a tale of a brooding exile driven to the point of hardcore terrorism. It's a tale of a retired space jockey and a retired stunt man coming out of retirement for just one more daredevil stunt. It's a tale of technologies banned for religious reasons back on Earth, about which its own advocates and practitioners in space have healthy fears. And yes, it's about science and scientists, so it's "hard."

It's also a very good read, by a writer whose breadth of human experience and wisdom derived therefrom goes way beyond the borders of Nerdistan.

Thus Ben Bova's take on Titan is a work of hard science fiction that you need not be a science fiction fan to appreciate, a good book through which those of you who are into other genres of good literature but have been repelled from science fiction by Trekkie stereotypes can take the plunge.

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