I started reading his book Voyage, and then swore never to read him again.

In many spots, he lifts dialogue directly out of Apollo or Shuttle mission transcripts, changing only the character names (that is, he re-uses Apollo dialogue on his Mars mission). In some cases very well known bits of dialague. It's maddening to a space buff, as you expect the other character to respond, "Gee, Hank, that's exactly what Crippen said back on STS 1!"

That at least is public domain stuff. Not particularly creative to recycle it, but no true harm done.

Much worse though, I found a number of instances of near-verbatim copying of paragraphs from Chaiken's A Man on the Moon, which came out about two years before Voyage. Several times when Baxter has a particularly vivid, metaphorical description of a scene, better than his usual prose, it turns out it's actually a passage that Chaiken wrote, with a couple of words changed, or a pastiche of a couple of different sentences out of Chaiken.

Inexusable and unforgivable.