A
library for the price of a book.
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 SeltzerA
library for the price of a book.
The
20 books on this Jules
Verne CD include Around the World in 80 Days, 20000 Leagues,
Robur, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Mysterious Island, Master of
the World, and Michael Strogoff. Some of these books are in French, some
are in English translation, and some are both. Complete
Table of Contents
From
Sherlock Holmes, to the Phantom of the Opera, to the Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu,
to Criminal Psychology, to Dracula and Frankenstein, the
Detective,
Mystery, Crime, and Horror CD contains 159 books, in plain-text,
with software that lets you listen as well as read.
Complete
table of contents
Review in Large
Print Reviews
What do Plutarch, Gibbon, Proudhon, Malthus, Houdini, Frazier, Jefferson,
Darwin, Veblen, Dewey, and Plato have in common? Their works are
all on the same Non-Fiction
CD, with over 1100 books.
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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