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Title: Intriguing science, unrelentingly bleak epic
Review: Baxter is the master of this emerging genre--brilliant and endlessly surprising science welded into a sealed tomb of a story. What irritates me are the highly misleading reviews that speak about the "Grand Tradition" of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clark because those masters were all driven fundamentally by hope and optimism whereas Baxter's ethos in both Titan and Moonseed is thoroughly postmodern. In fact Titan documents the collapse of modernism in a just-around-the-bend America that must reach back to the massive, creaking technology of abandoned NASA mega-machines with an achingingly detailed noble attempt to save humanity that ends, quite literally, with a lump of human feces as the seed of a ominous future. Brilliant... but I think that the tool of creative science is only a chimera here. Then again, perhaps it's all an excercise in postmodern irony. If so, I want my money back.
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