Author: John Varley
ISBN: 0441813046
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Ace Books
Genre: Science Fiction
Spoiler-Safe Story Synopsis
Of Saturn, there can be said many things. For example, it's very far away from Earth, it has funny rings going around it, and it has an amazing amount of satellites spinning around it. One of them grabs the attention of the crew of the Ringmaster, a ship under the command of one Cirocco Jones (she likes her friends to call her "Rocky") -- a new moon, one never seen before.
Of course, on the onset it doesn't appear to be much at all. A couple kilometers across, looks a bit like a captured asteroid, but it's proximity to the equatorial plane makes it highly likely to be a new moon. A new moon with an agenda. After all, how many planetary bodies in the Solar System are actually alive?
Titan is the first of the three books in the Gaean Trilogy by John Varley, and serves many purposes, all done with remarkable skill. First, it introduces the characters that the reader will be interacting with throughout the length of the series (after reading the first, it's expected that you'll be so very into it that you want to read the next two). You meet Cirocco "Rocky" Jones; her on-again, off-again lesbian lover Gaby Plauget; the bizarre test-tube twins, April & August Polo (Cirocco knew for a fact that "what the Polo sisters did behind the closed doors of their adjoining rooms was still illegal in Alabama"); Calvin Greene, the black doctor who constantly reminds everyone of those two attributes; Bill (last name is never given), Rocky's ever trustworthy engineer-cum-lover; and Eugene "Gene" Springfield (last name actually not given until Demon, book three) who slowly goes insane.
Right, now, you've met the humans. Of course, on Titan, later called Gaea, there are other species. And the crew of the DSV Ringmaster figure this out when, for reasons unknown at the time, the "moon" attacks the ship and consumes it. The crew is belched up through sphincter-like holes in the ground, their space suits and uniforms reduced to only the metal parts, such as neck rings, radios, and wrist guards. On this lush, green planet (actually shaped like a wheel, with six spokes) with 1/6th the gravity of Earth, the crew finds themselves separated, hungry, disoriented, and ... changed somehow. They each felt different in unique ways. Cirocco suddenly concerned with leadership. Gaby her sidekick. Bill the dutiful man. Gene, the arch nemesis. Calvin the intellectual. The Polo sisters the mysterious aliens. It sounds remarkably like a cut-and-paste science fiction plot, yes? Well, sorta...
Heck, Cirocco and Calvin both wake up able to speak the language of two different species. Cirocco learns to sing the language of the half-horse, half-people mythical creatures roaming in Hyperion (one of the many zones of Gaea), and Calvin learns to whistle to the blimps, Brobdingnagian creatures who float in the sky throughout the world.
The planet is teaming with life. Titanides, a wonderful centaur-like race, obsessed with the works of Sousa, great sand worms in the desert ala Dune, and myriad other strange beasts. It seems like the planet itself has been manufacturing things heard on radio transmissions up to a hundred years old. Turns out that's precisely what she's done, for the planet is quite alive, and she's quite bored -- and a bored god is an insane god. She'd love to meet a few good heroes.
The writing style of Titan is very easy to comprehend, each new technical aspect described in calm detail. It would be easy to get bogged down in the aspects of describing a brand new world, but Varley handles it well, describing each new aspect as it comes up in terms the reader can understand. Occasionally, he becomes a bit long winded -- for example, the Titanides have a strange way of reproducing requiring at least one and as many as four parents. Varley dwells on this a great deal throughout this and the next two books, even so much as providing a diagram at the back of the book explaining all of the possible Titanide reproductive ensembles.
But no one can attack his creativity, particularly when it comes to the half-horse, single- and dual-gendered Titanides and their culture, as well as the individual cultures of the other species met in the book. He goes into amazing detail on each one. Out of four broken-then-taped-in-the-middle-glasses, I give it Π. Excellent introduction to a splendid series (which gets 3.8 out of 4, but that's a different node.
The Gaean Trilogy
Titan | Wizard | Demon
Written for The Bookworm Turns: An Everything Literary Quest.