I was hoping when I saw the title that this would actually be about the Voyager space missions, that it would focus on the flybys of the Outer Planets and all the discovering appertained. Oo boy. I understand the author’s purpose in trying to link the so-called Third Age of Discovery with the grand voyages of the past, but quite honesty, I don’t give a good damn about that. I don’t give a good goddamn about the politics or the Cold War machinations behind the scenes, or the ‘God gold and greed’ motivations of explorers’ past.
I expected a bit more than a glossing over the planning, assembly and launch of the grand tour. One chapter, ‘Missing Mars’, gives us at best a couple of sentences whereby both Voyagers breeze harmlessly past the Red Planet, plus 20 pages of exposition peripherally related to Mars. So it goes. This is as bad as the Harry Potter novels, where the villains blow 20 pages reciting all the past slights, real or imagined, that Harry has inflicted on them. Very little detail on the Voyager program, pages and pages on the ocean-going voyages of old, over and over again. Next time maybe the author can do a tome actually devoted to Voyager; for now I am disappointed.