Clement's cast of characters is limited to thirty surviving crewmen of an original complement of one hundred, all consumed by a desperate race to find on Titan some antidote to the viral plagues that are decimating the home planet, Earth. The entire mission is infused with a fatalism, an expectation of ignominious death paralleled by the bleak prospects back on Terra. Their mission is to locate primitive life forms on Titan and determine if any of these can be useful in forestalling the takeover of Earth by viruses. They explore the icy oceans of Titan, seeking tectonic hotspots where the microbial life flourishes, and begin the slow familiarization required to operate in a new world. Even for a reader not buying the Earth-in-peril premise, the level of detail about the anticipatory intelligence required to successfully negotiate an alien terrain makes the novel worth reading. A strategy that may have worked for Jupiter's moon Europa or Io could well be inappropriate for Titan, whose icy oceans are comprised of different compounds than Jupiter's satellites.
Bova's mission to Saturn and Titan has distinct differences from Clement's. In Bova's future, the fundamentalists have triumphed on Earth and have "exiled" some 20,000 of its dissidents. Clearing out the terrestrial jails by colonizing Titan through a one-way ticket in a gigantic habitat roughly parallels the Great Transportation (of convicts from England to colonize Australia in the late 18th and early 19th Centuries). But some embedded fundamentalists have a secret agenda, to not allow any of the colonists to establish a new society without ensuring that the fundamentalist God reigns supreme there too.
Both novels take the colonization of Titan as their subject, but
HALF LIFE is really about the daunting technical challenges to
such an undertaking, whereas SATURN is more a meditation on human
nature and the seemingly never-ending rivalry between science and
faith. Choose according to your rational/emotional
predilection.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzerseltzer@seltzerbooks.com privacy statement