In both books, a lack of
vision leads to the near-extermination of humanity, leaving a small fragment
to shoulder responsibility for a possible redemption and rebirth of the
species.
Final mission
Titan (1997) is the
closer of the two novels to the present day, and the smaller in scale.
In the early 21st century, the Cassini
probe has detected possible signs of life on Titan, but a space shuttle
disaster has sapped the momentum of space exploration efforts.
Knowing that they may be
launching the last crewed space mission, a group of maverick scientists
and astronauts refit the Space Shuttle Discovery for a one-way trip to
the Saturnian moon. It’s a mission far beyond what the vehicle was designed
to do, but Discovery manages to limp its way to Saturn even as civilization
collapses behind it.
Baxter depicts the voyage
with his customary attention to realism and detail, but Titan is
not a tale of high adventure and derring-do, nor a gritty human drama.
Even the mysteries of Titan seem to be an afterthought -- instead, he seems
to be warning us that a reckoning awaits us if we lose our sense of wonder
and willingness to explore.
A pro-exploration allegory
The Shuttle crash that opens
the novel is a symbolic death, the final end of the "can do" NASA spirit
of the 1960s and early 1970s. Baxter goes on to decry the corruption and
organization infighting of the late 1970s, the incompetence of the 1980s
and the blundering small-mindedness of the "faster, better, cheaper" 1990s.
The characterizations and
situations are extreme because they are allegorical counterparts to real
events. When the Air Force attempts to shoot down the Discovery in Titan,
it recalls the service’s real-life efforts to derail the shuttle project.
Baxter also takes shots at
dim-witted voters, rabid nationalists and myopic foreign policy. Each of
the figures which appears in the novel is an extreme – but all have real-world
counterparts.
In the end, the story
resembles nothing so much as the tale of Noah and the ark. It is a
story of the faithful, guided by an inner vision to attempt a seemingly
ridiculous project, leading to a dangerous voyage that allows a few survivors
to begin again after the sinful world has its day of judgment.
Slow boat to the future
Baxter's earlier novel Ring
(1994) takes a different tone and a larger view, but there’s still
plenty of apocalypse to go around.
Here, after colonizing the
solar system, humanity has developed time travel using "exotic matter wormholes,"
only to discover that something is horribly wrong five million years in
the future.
The stars are aging rapidly,
leaving the main sequence state that best supports human life in short
supply. Humanity quickly implements an audacious plan to send a ship through
a wormhole to investigate the phenomenon – but can any culture survive
the 1,000 subjective years the trip will take?
Ring is
more of a straightforward science fiction adventure than Titan. The
story sprawls over millions of years and galactic distances, and there’s
plenty of amazing technology to inspire wonder.
Want to see whips made of
superstring a quarter-million miles long? How about a neutron star used
as a wrecking ball, a construction project the size of the solar system,
or a quantum singularity cannon?
Despite the scale, Baxter’s
universe is ruthlessly efficient and logically developed from current cosmological
theory. The human characters are difficult to relate to, but for a different
reason than in Titan: instead of being allegorical abstractions,
they are alien members of a golden-age culture of immortals.
Death by pride
In both Titan and
Ring, spaceships end up saving the last survivors of terrestrial
life from devastation.
Taken together, the books
present a complex message. If humanity is to survive, we must learn to
think big, but we must also learn to keep things in perspective.
Humanity is destroyed in
both novels because we are unable -- or unwilling -- to see the forest
for the trees. In Titan, our refusal to see the endless wonder that
the universe has to offer seals our doom, while in Ring, the golden
age ends when the immortals fail to acknowledge the existence of powers
greater than themselves.
In Baxter’s view, we should
spend our energy finding out whether there is life on Titan instead of
arguing over who controls Taiwan. While humanity may not be the biggest
kids on the block, there is plenty of block to go around, and maybe those
godlike aliens know something that we don’t.
To follow the allegory, perhaps
we may just find a glorious destiny if we choose to keep the big picture
in mind and our egos under control.
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