Titan, by Stephen Baxter (Voyager, £16.99 in UK)You've been a Space Shuttle astronaut, you're a senior NASA executive; you're a granny, to boot: do you fancy a six-year, billion-mile voyage to Titan, an inhospitable moon of Saturn, cooped up in a spaceship with people you can't stand, with little or no chance of survival and no fuel to return to earth even if you do survive? Baxter's laconic heroine does, and we suffer every step of the way with her. Even her one small step on to the poisonous slush of Titan is relegated to third-rate cable TV, as nobody on a decaying and ignorant earth (circa 2015 AD) cares any more. It's an extraordinary adventure story and very topical with the launch of the Cassini mission to Saturn and Titan, but the odd glimmer of optimism would have helped hold the reader's interest. (I'm ignoring the bizarre epilogue, which is too much, too late). Baxter is very good on the political battles which plague NASA and the space programme (see also his earlier Voyage, about exploring Mars); he's excellent on the scientific background to space flight and possible life on Titan; he's poor, however, on character development. The motivation of the characters, what drives them to undergo such misery, is insufficiently explored. The most promising relationship, involving lesbian sex in space, ends with one lover's premature demise. Baxter is an ambitious writer - he foresees the dastardly Chinese diverting an asteroid to earth, as early as 2015, and destroying all human life as we know it, including China itself, unfortunately - but brevity and humour are not his strong points.
The Neutronium Alchemist, by Peter F. Hamilton (Macmillan, £17.99 in UK)
This is the second part of Hamilton's immense Night's Dawn trilogy, the follyer-upper to The Reality Dysfunction (what a great title). Reality dysfunctions even more in this one, causing the dead to arise and possess the living; after a thousand pages, the known universe is left in an almighty mess and the reader is left punch-drunk and waiting anxiously for the final instalment. Set in 2611 AD, in a world where Earth is just one destination on the cosmic roadmap, the book is vast in scale - 150 characters are listed in the dramatis personae. Hamilton plays chess impressively with his complex array of humans, aliens and exotic locations; his plot is ambitious and coherent. The subject matter, however, is disturbing, a sort of Night of the Living Dead Goes Intergalactic. There is graphic torture and downright evil carry-on by the ungrateful dead. In what should have been a great comic opportunity, Al Capone returns (in someone else's person) and takes over the possesseds' Organisation but the deranged mobster just isn't funny. If the poor universe is to be saved at all, Hamilton's third volume will have to be equally gargantuan; I await its arrival with an appalled fascination.
Oracle, by Ian Watson (Gollancz, £16.99 in UK);
Child of the River, by Paul J. McAuley (Gollancz, £16.99 in UK)
Two fantasies from Gollancz: Oracle is an absurd yarn about a time-travelling Roman centurion mixed up with an IRA gang and the British Secret Service in and around Milton Keynes. One of the characters is a beautiful Finn who speaks fluent Latin and lives in Brussels. A Milton Keynesian pall hangs over everything. Far from Milton Keynes, and all the better for it, McAuley's book portrays the strange magical future world of Confluence, medieval in its atmosphere and barbaric customs. It's a crisply written adventure story with not a starship in sight. McAuley's use of language is elegant and original; he uses charming words like "eldritch" and "divaricationist". An excellent story and, surprise, surprise, part of a trilogy.
3001: The Final Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke (Voyager, £16.99 in UK)
The final episode of the old maestro's Space Odyssey was published earlier this year; the paperback is due out this month. It's a calm, lucid book, driven by Clarke's eternal curiosity about the long-term future of mankind and of space exploration. Frank Poole of the spaceship Discovery is found drifting in space and is brought back to life and earth in 3001 AD, having missed out completely on the previous thousand years. Frank copes remarkably well - all that NASA training pays off - and finds peace and even love. His wanderlust remains, though, and on a dramatic trip to Jupiter's moon Europa, he is reunited with the ghosts of his old shipmate Dave Bowman and the legendary HAL computer from 2001. The story is simple, more a tying-up of loose ends than a new drama in its own right. Clarke's soaring visions of the loneliness of space are anchored firmly by his technical footnotes. These are gems of probing intellectual curiosity, referencing academic papers and works of popular science alike. Despite the scale of Clarke's imagination, he is modest in his hopes for what mankind may achieve in space by 3001 or so. His science fiction, like the best of the genre, is always tempered by a deep humanism, a hope that our descendants do have a long-term future.
Idoru, William Gibson (Penguin, £6.99 in UK)
As well as the wildly ambitious fantasy worlds of Peter F. Hamilton or Iain M. Banks (in his Culture stories), science fiction has room for writers who can take today's technology and project it just a little into the future. William Gibson's future world of virtual reality and the ubiquitous Net is all the more effective as it is nearly upon us. Idoru is based on the daunting premise that a Japanese pop star wishes to marry his virtual idol-singer who, by definition, doesn't exist in reality. It's a fragile work, but beautifully told in two parallel narrative strands, with many insights into pop culture and into a society overloaded with electronic information. The author manages to see the world through the eyes of a 14-year-old female pop fan who is never separated from her beloved computer; Gibson puts his fascination with technology and his fertile imagination to the service of creating science fiction on a human scale.