To The Last Page

There's an element of fanboy excitement in Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds taking up the challenge of continuing the adventures of Arthur C. Clarke's space explorer Howard Falcon in The Medusa Chronicles , but there's another relevant reason for doing it. The hero of Clarke's 1971 novella A Meeting With Medusa was cybernetically rebuilt after an accident piloting a balloon, the mechanical enhancements permitting him to take part in the first manned mission to Jupiter. The spirit of the novella was partly boy's own SF adventure, but like most of Arthur C. Clarke's work, it dealt with the need to continue with the advancement of scientific investigation and exploration, and through it to better understand and develop the capacity of mankind. Science, technology, cybernetics and biological enhancements have advanced considerably in the time since Clarke's original novella, and a lot more is known about the planets in the solar system and about what lies b...