NASA Trilogy
3 primary works Complete
Book 1
Book 2
NASA's Cassini probe will reach Titan in 2004: Titan is the amazing story of a visionary's response to the discovery of life on Saturn's moon. Another BIG space novel from the acclaimed successor to Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein: the conquest of space as it could still happen.
Titan is the epic saga of one woman's will to succeed and the triumph of a dream over bureaucracy and fear. Paula Benacerraf, grandmother and astronaut, is appointed to oversee the dismantling of the Shuttle fleet after another Challenger-type disaster. Instead, she listens to the oddball JPL scientist Rosenberg, who is determined to explore the ammonia-based life Cassini discovers on Titan.
Using NASA's rusting Saturn rockets, mothballed Apollos and remaining Shuttles, frail humans are hurled, in the face of violent opposition from the military, to the edge of the Solar System. To the edge, also, of sanity.
Book 3
In the 1970s astronauts brought rock samples back from the Moon. Many remained locked away for decades … including one unique piece of bedrock, the Moonseed. At last exposed to daylight, it proves to be deadly, though not to people. It kills the Earth.
In his new novel, Stephen Baxter, `the best SF author in Britain’ (SFX), contemplates rock – living rock. Transported to Earth by Apollo astronaut Jays Malone in 1972, a single shard of bedrock from the Moon contains within its innocuous-looking shell the power to destroy worlds.
Geologist Henry Meacher – his career at JPL in ruins, his marriage over – is given a sample of the Moon bedrock to analyse. He goes with it to Edinburgh University, the only place that will have him. There the deadly Moon rock accidentally comes into contact with the Earth’s core in the form of lava from Edinburgh’s famous extinct volcanoes. It turns solid rock to seething Moonseed dust. Soon perhaps the whole world will be infected.
Inspired, terrified, Henry Meacher is a changed man. If the worst happens, his plan is to take Earth’s displaced peoples from the Earth to the Moon. Baxter’s stunning story is one of disaster, desperate measures and damage limitation, forcing humanity to an excess of ingenuity and courage. Ironically, it is a newly terraformed Moon that holds the key to our survival…