Tag: Stephen Baxter

Fortress Sol by Stephen Baxter

Well, I’ll say one thing about Fortress Sol — it’s not lacking in ambition.

In the 22nd century, a strange energy-based swarm consumes Neptune, and fearing this is a precursor to an alien attack, the human race takes a number of bizarre steps to defend itself, and ensure its survival if it can’t.

Fortress Sol

A generation starship is launched in a century-long journey to colonise a distant star system. …

… And much closer to home, an ambitious millennia-long project begins, to hide the solar system from the as-yet-unseen invaders.

A thousand years later, the Lightbird returns to the Sol system to see what has become of Earth. The crew finds that humanity has masked the entire solar system in a shroud, wrapped the Sun in a Dyson sphere, and is now travelling around the hidden solar system on a planet-spanning rail network!

As I said: ambitious!

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Titan by Stephen Baxter

This is one of those deep deep science fiction reads; lots of science and engineering concepts that must’ve taken an eon to research and tie together into a story.

Titan tells the tale of the first manned expedition to Titan – one of Saturn’s moons that is believed to be capable of supporting life. (The scientists have evidence that somewhere on the moon, something is breathing.)

Now, this definitely isn’t the same kind of adventure as the galaxy spanning Noumenon Trilogy, where thousands of highly-trained clones set off highly advanced starships, on a journey that will take centuries to complete.

No, this book starts in 2008, and takes a handful of astronauts on a six-year journey to a Titan, travelling on an old shuttle cobbled together from whatever parts NASA has lying around, before the whole Administration is subsumed by the US Department of Agriculture.

Needless to say, no one (least of all, the astronauts) expects the team to return. Indeed, they all signed on knowing that, in all likelihood, the mission is a one-way trip.

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