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Ben Bova's "Grand Tour" of the solar system is full of life. Two things especially distinguish the life his characters discover on other worlds from life on our own world.

One is that, unlike traditional science fiction, the inhabitants of Bova's planets and moons are rarely at all like us. That is the case with Titan. I enjoyed that the discoveries on Titan and Saturn's rings in this book challenge our understandings of the complexities of life and our understanding of what life actually is. Single-celled or microbial life is almost certainly more common than life like us -- after all, it's more common on Earth as well. But I suspect we haven't yet appreciated how complex the behavior and even the social organization of such life can be. The depictions of the variety of life in Titan build on Bova's credentials as a writer of "hard" science fiction.

The other distinction between life on our world and Bova's other worlds is how much humanity manages constantly to get in its own way. Most of the action in Titan takes place aboard the Goddard colony ship (from Bova's earlier book, Saturn), populated by refugees from an Earth dominated by the "New Morality." On Goddard, though, conflicts between the scientific mission and the effort to establish a thriving colony and between personal and collective ambitions recreate themselves. This is what we do.

It may be that I've read too many of Bova's Grand Tour books too quickly, but this one struck me as a bit flat, compared to some of the others. Jupiter and Venus, in particular, gave me a greater sense of suspense and involvement. The characters in those books seemed more complex, more built of battling passions and motivations. Here, the characters seem to fit more easily into their places in the story -- sure, they make decisions, they confound one another, but they seem more to slide together like pieces in a puzzle than to produce a picture that only becomes what it is when it emerges from the mix.