Titan (Gaea)
by John Varley

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Book Reviews of Titan (Gaea)

Book Review: A classic of 1970's-vintage space opera
Summary: 2 Stars

An enormous investment of imagination and analysis went into creating Gaea, the giant living space-habitat where the story takes place. Many novels of this day were full of strange alien landscapes and creatures that come off as hollow flights of fancy arranged by authorial fiat. Here though, they fit together in symbiosis. Even the parts of the world that seem "not quite right" on the first read through make perfect sense at the end after finding out more about the world's history. In fact, this is a good analogy for the plot of the book as a whole: a series of apparently random adventures with little obvious connection that finally makes perfect sense at the end when you learn what's really been going on.

Titan is also a reasonably good psychological novel. The opening events leave all the human characters mentally "damaged" in various ways, and Varley does a very believable, mature job of developing the plot as each character overcomes or sinks deeper into his or her respective psychosis.

What prevents Titan from being much better than it is is that Varley does not apply this same maturity to his handling of the various sexual issues he tries to address. In his treatment of free love, homosexuality, rape, abortion, and the like, his characters don't act like the liberated personalities he intends them to be, but simply as people who are as dogmatized in one direction as the American society of thirty years ago was dogmatized in the other. As a result, what Varley intended as thought provoking, having in time lost all shock value, comes off somewhere between childish and puerile. Especially in their almost fetishistic attention to alien pudenda, these passages are no longer good for much more than the titillation of 14-year old boys.

In short, Titan is among the best of the "adventure while exploring alien landscape" space operas of yesteryear. It surpasses most of that genre in terms of both coherency and imagination, and only falls down where it tried to run a path many books like it would not even try to tiptoe.

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