NASA has dreamed of sending astronauts to Mars for at least the past six decades. For a time in the late 1960s and early ’70s, agency officials advanced plans to do just that once the Apollo program had wound down. Those plans faltered, of course, foiled by political and budgetary pressures on the Nixon Administration, which was still waging war in Vietnam. But the English science fiction author Stephen Baxter imagines things turned out differently in his extraordinary doorstopper novel, Voyage, about a fictional mission to Mars. His what-if version of history assumes that JFK survived the assassin’s bullets in 1963 and successfully lobbied from his wheelchair for the Mars mission, overshadowing President Nixon. It’s a plausible argument, and Baxter makes the most of it in this intimate, step-by-step account of the politics, the engineering hurdles, and the human drama of the mission itself.
A long, complex story with a woman at its heart
Throughout the nearly eight hundred pages of the novel, we follow the career of astronaut Natalie York. At the outset we meet her at the launch of the Ares spacecraft headed out on an eighteen-month mission to Mars. York is the mission specialist in a crew of three. She is the world’s reigning expert on the geology of the Red Planet. Then we cut to her backstory, which we observe in short chapters alternating with progressive scenes in space as Ares makes its way to Mars.
As York’s story unfolds, we meet the two men with her on the mission, Commander Phil Stone, formerly a US Air Force test pilot who was the last to fly the X-15 experimental aircraft, and Ralph Gershon, who had flown a USAF fighter-bomber in the Nixon Administration’s illegal incursion into Cambodia. Gershon is African American and thus widely viewed as an outsider in the astronaut corps, like York.
Early on in the story we also meet the men behind the scenes at NASA and its suppliers who carry the torch for manned spaceflight. It’s they who design and build the massive machines that will carry York, Stone, and Gershon to Mars. They’re all there: the early astronauts, the engineers, the NASA administrators, the politicians, and the astronauts’ families. Voyage offers a panoramic view of the space program, and it’s solidly grounded in reality despite Baxter’s flight of fantasy about the history.
Voyage (NASA Trilogy #1) by Stephen Baxter (1996) 784 pages ★★★★★
Winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History
A feast for space enthusiasts
What stands out above all in Voyage is Baxter’s care in grounding his story in the science and technology of the time. At every stage of Ares‘ development, and throughout York’s mission to Mars, he explains in detail how things work. And there is a great deal to explain. After all, the Saturn V rocket that boosts Ares on its way to the Red Planet contains an astounding 5.6 million parts—and every single one of them needs to work, or the mission might be in trouble. When things go wrong, as inevitably they do, Baxter shows exactly how the resourceful crew manages workarounds.
Elsewhere in print in other novels, as well as in nonfiction accounts, in film, and on television, I’ve come across other explanations of how things might work in space. But Voyage is an outlier in Baxter’s celebration of the brilliance of the engineering that makes spaceflight possible. It’s a veritable feast for any space enthusiast.
Why should we send a manned mission to Mars?
For as long as I can remember—and I’ve been following developments since Sputnik I in 1957—aerospace engineers and science fiction writers alike have fantasized about traveling to Mars. It’s not too much to call it an obsession. And not just in the United States. Of the forty-seven Mars missions from October 10, 1960, to October 23, 2023, nineteen were launched by the Soviet Union or its successor state, Russia. And China, India, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, and the European Union have all gotten into the game as well. Of course, none of these missions were manned. But many of those who sent them on their way no doubt harbored hopes that they presaged efforts to send people to the Red Planet. The obsession lingers.
But a substantial majority of the scientific community, and many in the space industry, believe that far more interesting targets lie elsewhere in the Solar System. Some regard the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter as the most compelling objective. The potential for asteroid mining is boundless. Untold riches in essential materials, from water to heavy metals, lie there to be tapped as Earth’s own resources play out. But scientists focus on the search for evidence that the stirrings of life might have evolved elsewhere than on Earth.
Where might there be evidence of life?
In fact, there is considerable speculation that reservoirs of liquid water exist under the surface of Mars. Some believe that water may harbor evidence of microscopic life. But most space scientists are convinced that the best prospects for finding evidence of life in the Solar System lies under the surface of the dwarf planet Ceres in the asteroid belt and some of the larger of the 257 moons of the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. The most frequently mentioned potential targets are these:
Jupiter: Io, Calisto, Ganymede, Europa
Neptune: Triton
NASA and the space agencies of other countries have, in fact, sent fly-by missions past every one of these targets in recent years. And in 2005, on a mission called Cassini, NASA landed the Huygens Probe on Titan, the only moon in the Solar System to possess an atmosphere. And on October 10, 2024, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper on a mission to Europa. It’s scheduled to enter Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2030.
About the author
Stephen Baxter is the author of sixty-two science fiction novels and three collections of short fiction. He has won a long list of awards for his writing. Baxter was born in 1951 in Liverpool, England. He holds an undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Cambridge, a doctorate in engineering from the University of Southampton, and an MBA from Henley Management College. A chartered engineer, he has been a full-time author since 1995.
For related reading
For another alternate history about the same topic, see The Fated Sky (Lady Astronaut #2) by Mary Robinette Kowal (An astonishingly good science fiction novel about the first manned mission to Mars).
You’ll find this book along with similar titles at Good books about space travel and Great alternate history novels.
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- The top science fiction novels
- These novels won both Hugo and Nebula Awards
- The ultimate guide to the all-time best science fiction novels
- 10 new science fiction authors worth reading now
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