- Carroll, Michael.
On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea.
Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2015.
ISBN 978-3-319-17758-8.
-
By the mid-23rd century, humans have become a spacefaring
species. Human settlements extend from the Earth to the moons
of Jupiter, Mars has been terraformed into a world with seas
where people can live on the surface and breathe
the air. The industries of Earth and Mars are supplied by
resources mined in the asteroid belt. High-performance drive
technologies, using fuels produced in space,
allow this archipelago of human communities to participate in
a system-wide economy, constrained only by the realities of
orbital mechanics. For bulk shipments of cargo, it doesn't
matter much how long they're in transit, as long as regular
deliveries are maintained.
But whenever shipments of great value traverse a largely empty
void, they represent an opportunity to those who would seize
them by force. As in the days of wooden ships returning treasure
from the New World to the Old on the home planet, space cargo en
route from the new worlds to the old is vulnerable to pirates,
and an arms race is underway between shippers and buccaneers
of the black void, with the TriPlanet Bureau of Investigation (TBI)
finding itself largely a spectator and confined to tracking down
the activities of criminals within the far-flung human communities.
As humanity expands outward, the frontier is
Titan,
Saturn's largest moon, and the only moon in the solar system
to have a substantial atmosphere. Titan around 2260 is
much like present-day Antarctica: home to a variety of
research stations operated by scientific agencies of various
powers in the inner system. Titan is much more interesting
than Antarctica, however. Apart from the Earth, it is the only
solar system body to have natural liquids on its surface,
with a complex cycle of evaporation, rain, erosion, rivers,
lakes, and seas. The largest sea,
Kraken Mare,
located near the north pole, is larger than Earth's Caspian
Sea. Titan's atmosphere is half again as dense as that of
Earth, and with only 14% of Earth's gravity, it is possible for
people to fly under their own muscle power.
It's cold: really cold. Titan receives around
one hundredth the sunlight as the Earth, and the mean temperature
is around −180 °C. There is plenty of water on
Titan, but at these temperatures water is a rock as hard as
granite, and it is found in the form of mountains and boulders
on the surface. But what about the lakes? They're filled with
a mixture of
methane and
ethane,
hydrocarbons which can exist in either gaseous or liquid form
in the temperature range and pressure on Titan. Driven by
ultraviolet light from the Sun, these hydrocarbons react with
nitrogen and hydrogen in the atmosphere to produce organic
compounds that envelop the moon in a dense layer of smog and
rain out, forming dunes on the surface. (Here “organic”
is used in the chemist's sense of denoting compounds
containing carbon and does not imply they are of biological origin.)
Mayda Research Station, located on the shore of Kraken Mare,
hosts researchers in a variety of fields. In addition
to people studying the atmosphere, rivers, organic compounds
on the surface, and other specialties, the station is home to
a drilling project intended to bore through the ice crust and
explore the liquid water ocean believed to lie below. Mayda
is an isolated station, with all of the interpersonal dynamics
one expects to find in such environments along with the usual
desire of researchers to get on with their own work. When
a hydrologist turns up dead of hypothermia—frozen to
death—in his bed in the station, his colleagues are
baffled and unsettled. Accidents happen, but this is something
which simply doesn't make any sense. Nobody can think of either
a motive for foul play nor a suspect. Abigail Marco, an atmospheric
scientist from Mars and friend of the victim, decides to investigate
further, and contacts a friend on Mars who has worked with the TBI.
The death of the scientist is a mystery, but it is only the first in
a series of enigmas which perplex the station's inhabitants
who see, hear, and experience things which they, as scientists,
cannot explain. Meanwhile, other baffling events threaten the
survival of the crew and force Abigail to confront
part of her past she had hoped she'd left on Mars.
This is not a “locked station mystery” although
it starts out as one. There is interplanetary action and
intrigue, and a central puzzle underlying everything that
occurs. Although the story is fictional, the environment
in which it is set is based upon our best present day
understanding of Titan, a world about which little was known
before the arrival of the
Cassini
spacecraft at Saturn in 2004 and the landing of its
Huygens
probe on Titan the following year. A twenty page appendix describes
the science behind the story, including the environment at Titan,
asteroid mining, and terraforming Mars. The author's nonfiction
Living Among Giants (March 2015)
provides details of the worlds of the outer solar system and the
wonders awaiting explorers and settlers there.
December 2016 