A Houseboat on Titan

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Pop quiz.  What's the largest sea on Titan?

Why, Kraken Mare, of course.

Now the Cassini probe has discovered the largest river to date on the second-largest moon in the solar system  (Ganymede is largest; our own Moon is number five), and it flows into Kraken Mare.  The surface of Titan is so cold that water-ice is as hard as granite.  So, by the best analyses, the seas and rivers are made up of ethane and methane.

Titan, which you all know is the largest moon of Saturn, presents a particularly difficult problem in mapping because it has a murky atmosphere in which all kinds of interesting chemical reactions are going on, so none of its surface is visible from above.  All the mapping has to be done by radar.

The common reportage is comparing this new discovery to the River Nile, which is silly when you consider that the new river is somewhere between 200 and 250 miles long, while the Nile extend over four thousand miles.  But it's still a terrific discovery, especially when you're as old as I am.

When I was a kid, all the solar moons other than our own were mysterious and blurry spots on photographic plates.  Very little was known about any of them, other than that they were there.  Now, there are maps of many of them.

I'm particularly interested in news from Titan because ten years ago I wrote a story set there which went on to win a Hugo Award.  It was called "Slow Life" and was based on dozens and dozens of NASA technical papers which I downloaded from the Web and read and internalized until they told me a story.  The presence of ethane-methane lakes and seas was purely speculative at the time, and I took a chance on them existing because I could have a better story if they did.  So I really lucked out there.

Looking at that grainy radar photo above, though, I feel my imagination stirring.  Had it existed when I wrote "Slow Life," I would almost certainly have had a scene set on a raft on that river.  I would have drawn a large map and named every tributary, twist, and cove of it.  I would have sent my astronaut on a perilous journey to the north, into Kraken Mare, there to make some strange discovery.  I would have sent my mind to live there for a few months.  And I would have written a very different story than the one I did.

That story is out there to be written.  There's a flood of great new information still pouring in and being made available to all the world for free by NASA, and God bless them for that.  I'm not likely to return to Titan because then I'd be competing with myself.  But if you're a new or gonnabe writer, why not give the possibility some thought?  SF editors love hard SF because it's popular and because they get so little of it.

Feel free to write a better story than mine.  I won't mind.  The next Hugo could be yours.

You can read about the (still unnamed) river here .

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