Book Review: Titan (by John Varley)

John Varley

1979

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Nebula, Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

SPOILER ALERT

At the beginning of John Varley’s Titan, a small group of seven astronauts are headed out towards Saturn in the spaceship Ringmaster on an international mission of scientific exploration. Led by the independent and strong-willed but also somewhat irritatingly insecure Captain Cirocco Jones, it is a tight-knit crew with flexible romantic arrangements: by the end of the voyage, almost every person has slept with almost every other person of the opposite gender, and occasionally some people of the same gender.

The story is pretty slow to get going. During the first two chapters, which cover the voyage to Saturn, I was turned off enough by the characters’ personalities, the impersonal games of sexual musical chairs, and some of the author’s more annoying habits of prose that I was ready to give up.

Fortunately, things got better for a while. When the Ringmaster gets to Saturn, they discover a huge object in orbit around the planet. At first they think it is an undocumented moon, but as they get nearer it turns out to be an enormous, rotating torus-shaped artificial construct. They fly in close to investigate, their ship gets forcibly hauled in by a tentacled beast coming from the object, and they all go unconscious.

They then go through a surreal period of mental limbo after which they are all deposited in disparate places around the interior rim of the torus, which turns out to be an enormous oxygen-rich habitat filled with alien trees and grasses and animals. This is the best part of the book, as the members of the crew reunite and try to prevent themselves from being eaten by the native wildlife and killed by the indigenous sentient beings while they figure out how to escape and get home.

It seems very much like a combination of two earlier novels: Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Philip José Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go. The torus is like a mini version of Ringworld in its artificiality, its huge scale, the abruptly defined sections of night and day, and the variety of environments and life forms. And the characters’ rebirth inside it is reminiscent of the resurrection process from Farmer’s book: they emerge into a strange raw environment completely naked and hairless, and they have to rebuild their clothes, technology, and, in some cases, memories from scratch. (And, like Farmer’s characters, they also even eventually wind up traveling up a big central river in their own handmade boats.)

Unfortunately, the plot takes a turn for the worse in the last third of the book when Captain Jones decides she wants answers about what has happened to her crew, and that the only way to get those answers is by taking an arduous, tedious, months-long trek up to the center of the torus. I got exhausted by it long before the characters did. They would conquer one obstacle and then would be presented with another five times more daunting, including, at one point, a horrible rapist. Personally, I would have given up in the first week and gone back to the calm grassy land with the nice centaur people.

It started to seem especially pointless when they started downgrading the purpose behind the trek. Originally, they wanted to figure out how to escape the torus—which they had by this time started calling Gaea—and to get home. But later on they shift to just wanting an explanation for what happened, and then eventually they don’t care about saving themselves anymore but just want to prevent war between the indigenous sentient life forms of Gaea.

And when they do finally get to the center of Gaea, it is disappointingly anticlimactic. The entity at the center is a bit annoying, frankly, and offers pretty contrived reasoning for why they were captured, held, changed, stripped, and released. After the huge build-up of their journey, the whole thing was hastily explained in a matter of fifteen or so pages, and then everybody (or almost everybody) goes back to their preferred homes with new-found celebrity status and lives happily ever after.

One aspect of the writing that didn’t help is that descriptions of physical locations were sometimes very confusing. For the most part, the writing was very straightforward, but during particularly dramatic moments or crucial expository sections, settings suddenly became un-picturable. For example:

     The support cables came in rows of five organized into groups of fifteen, and rows of three standing alone.

     Each night region had fifteen cables associated with it. There was a row of five vertical cables that went straight up the hollow horn in the roof that was the inside of one of the spokes of Gaea’s wheel. Two of these came to the ground in the highlands and were virtually a part of the wall, one north and the other south. One emerged from a point midway between the outermost cables, and the other two were spaced evenly between the center and edge cables.

     In addition to these central cables, the night regions had two more rows of five that radiated from the spokes but attached in daylight areas, one row twenty degrees east and the other twenty degrees west of the central row.   (Titan, Page 121)

I don’t think I should have to be a geographer or an architect to be able to imagine this scene. Ringworld, too, was an artificial ring-shaped habitat created by aliens, and had more diversity of habitat on a much larger scale, but it was so vividly and clearly described that I felt like I always could picture the environment and structure with no problems—even the complicated side wall ports where ships docked and the suspended sheets creating night and day.

And one other final peeve: it seemed that in the sections of the book where the plot was laboring the hardest, Varley would slip into expressing his characters’ emotions through overdramatic physical actions that human beings don’t often really do. People chewed on their knuckles; they palmed, slammed, or slapped control panel buttons; they variously hit their palm on a bed, smacked a tree with the palm of their hand, and hit their forehead with the heel of their hand; and, of course, they bit their lips and their tongues.