Stephen Baxter - Titan

Together, the children of Sol began to remake the worlds of a new star.

The untimely death of Carl Sagan (1934-1996), who has a cameo role in Book Two of this novel, was a sad footnote to a year full of scientific wonders.

Sagan was an astronomer and planetary scientist, and author of accessible and uplifting non-fiction and science fiction. As a scientist, Sagan played an active role on spaceprobes such as Mariner 9 to Mars — Sagan ensured the probe was positioned to photograph Mars’s moons — and Pioneer 10 to Jupiter and beyond, on which Sagan was responsible for placing a message to alien life. Sagan’s speculations on terraforming Venus — the first serious scientific speculation on the subject — on the possibility of permafrost on Mars, and on conditions on Titan, helped influence the thinking of subsequent workers and writers — including myself.

Like H.G. Wells, Sagan seems to have believed that the future of mankind would be a race between education and catastrophe. In 1984 he co-authored the concept of nuclear winter which may, perhaps, have helped avert that very catastrophe from befalling us. As we near the end of a millennium still largely gripped by the madnesses which dominated its opening, we cannot afford to lose Sagan’s brand of clear-thinking, cheerful, communicative rationality.

Carl Sagan’s death was announced after I had drafted his appearance in Titan. So, sadly, this book is already alternate history. But I decided Sagan should stay in.

Stephen Baxter

Great Missenden

January 1997

An earlier version of one chapter in this novel appeared in a very different form in Interzone magazine, No. 105, 1996.