Titan

Stephen Baxter published Titan in 1997, and it was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1998. Its subject is a human mission to the moon of Saturn, and the question of what the expedition will find when it gets there.

The novel is as much an argument as an adventure. It sets out a range of attitudes to space exploration and to science, and it carries Baxter's own worries about anti-intellectualism and about the loss of a pioneering spirit in American politics and culture at the end of the twentieth century.

Those worries are dramatised in the politics of the book's near future. The United States is led by a fundamentalist Christian president called Xavier Maclachlan, who believes that the Earth is the centre of the universe and orders that the Ptolemaic model of the solar system be taught on equal terms with the modern one. Against that background the mission to Titan is assembled by people who believe the opposite about what a country should be doing with its money and its nerve.