SF. Very good time travel, alternate universes.

tiring in the long run ( )

I really enjoyed this science fiction mindbender. To call Baxter's characters one dimensional would perhaps be generous. However, Baxter is such a smooth writer that he gets a pass. Some of the scientific concepts he introduces boggled my brain (in a good way) and his descriptions really conjure up some amazing visuals. The book even manages to have a pulse-quickening climax. Fully intend to read more in the series. ( )

This book is porn for scientists, with the point of the erotic imagination focused upon highly abstract theory instead of bodies. As such, the characters are two-dimensional vessels who aren't fleshed out so much as they serve as either symbols or conduits for the author's scientific and philosophical jargon. Male, female, professional scientist or congresswoman, if you're a character in this book you're musing about paradoxes and subatomic particles with the best of them, or asking others to clarify the dense ideas Baxter is putting forth. That is, if you're not one of the shadowy, ineffectual antagonists that haunt the edges of these pages - bureaucrats, aid workers, or one of the legion of 'beefy' armed men (religious fundamentalists, vengeful parents, domineering soldiers) who step in the way of capitalist wunderkind Reid Malenfant.

Outside of his characters in particular, the author's conception of how humans work is rather masturbatory: imagine a universe in which the vast majority of people would experience an existential crisis and panic because of a logical conundrum. Or where all the major networks would devote live airtime to an interview with a spokesperson from a shadowy organization devoted to predicting the end of the universe. Humans don't act like humans so much as they act like references for the author's ideas, and to me, these sorts of events require leaps in logic far greater than a book filled with multiple worlds, higher consciousness perpetuated through looping thoughts, and the destruction of all creation, and it's hard not to see the author simply imagining a universe in which most people would actually read, enjoy and understand this book while valuing the scientific ideas he puts forward as much as he does.

The prose, even when not loaded with poorly-explained scientific theories, is tiresome and repetitive - Baxter is often so consumed with describing the physical minutiae of space shuttles, asteroids, and outer space in general that he either fails to realize or disregards how often he repeats terms even within the same paragraph (regolith being the most memorable). Details are included which seem meaningless and distracting - for exampl,e his liberal use of the brand 'Shit Cola' seems playful at first, a jab at consumerism, but doesn't carry through and becomes absurd. At times there are sentences which seem to contradict the events that follow:

"All of them were bundled up against the chill.

Dan, crumpled and slightly drunk, looked as if he hadn't changed his T-shirt since Florida. Cornelius wasn't drinking. He was wearing his customary designer suit, neat and seamless; somehow he seemed sealed off from this environment: green hills and silence and stately nature."

But wait, I thought they were bundled up?

Or, later in the book, when the military has been dispatched by the U.S. government to recall someone from the Moon:

"The scrap of paper had been brought here, all the way to the Moon, by a burly-looking Marine. He looked as if he had been ordered to drag Maura out by her hair if necessary."

Uh oh. Sounds like serious business, right? Fortunately for our morally-gray heroine,

"...after three days in space-presumably without proper training or orientation-this poor grunt was green as a lettuce leaf and looked as if he could barely stand up..."

Now, presumably the U.S. government was in a rush because the orders had come down from its new Christian fundamentalist president to recall this character due to her ties with events previous in the book. I guess they just really, really wanted her back - and they had no choice but to send someone with no space training whatsoever because, well, presumably all their space marines had been destroyed in a previous battle, and as demonstrated previously with the main male character's showdown with NASA, the US government acts really, really slowly even when it thinks you're doing something illegal, or just doesn't want you doing it, period. So slowly, in fact, that you have just enough time to launch a shuttle into space because the congressional delegation that's arrived to stop you didn't include any police.

But I digress.


The point is, these little incidents add a general surreality to the book, cause by and large by the fact that the author prioritizes trying to explain and play out very abstract theory over things like believable, sympathetic characters. ( )

Never finished book - about squid who are trained to operate space vehicle to special asteroid which has portal to future

Excellent read. Be prepared to think about quantum concepts that Baxter tosses into the narrative. ( )

A really solid "broad spectrum" hard SF novel. It begins much like an updated Heinlein "Man who sold the moon" story, as Elon Musk-like Reid Malenfant (quite the surname) launches his own program to return to space, after being rejected by a moribund NASA (much disparaged here). But then Baxter mixes in large doses of Greg Egan, first on the biology side as Malenfant's astronauts are squids with genetically engineered brains, who begin to evolve rapidly once free of Earth. A message from the future redirects the mission and from there thing move into Stapledon territory, as we get not one, but two logarithmically scaled tours, in time and in space. Egan returns as the very nature of the physical universe is brought into play. As with Egan, things become pretty hard to follow, but for the most part, Baxter is far more successful at keeping the narrative flow moving and tracking the arcs for a handful of believable if not complex characters. There are the usual time loop paradoxes. The one part that did not work for me at all was the way in Baxter portrayed the world's responses to several events predicting humanity's ultimate outcome. I've never understood why SF authors are so fond of the scenes where the planet's population responds in some unified way to some semi-mystical discovery or message from beyond. When has that ever happened?

Despite that, this is a book that promises big things, science fictionally, and delivers. Highly recommended for hard SF fans. ( )

JohnGrant1's synopsis is really all you need. Compelling scientific and philosophical ideas, but a novel much more fun to summarize than read. ( )

Highly evolved squid fly to an asteroid with a portal to other universes. Overall brilliant, but a little loose around the edges -- especially the last fifty or so pages traveling through the multiverse. ( )

This is an extraordinarily ambitious and complex novel . . . and in it I have at last found an sf story that accords with the pejorative phrase Margaret Atwood uses to diminish all the science fiction she doesn't write herself: yes, this is the skiffy novel that has talking squid in it! In fact, the way Baxter has handled the sections featuring the squid impressed me greatly: I found myself empathizing with the creatures in a way I would not have thought possible.

In a future so near we've actually reached it -- the novel's set in the year 2010 (Baxter, recall, was writing a decade ago) -- roguish entrepreneur and obvious naughty boy Reid Malenfant has a dream of thwarting the bureaucracy of NASA and returning humanity to space. In the remote Mojave desert he has gathered shuttle castoffs on the pretext of using the engines as the ultimate incinerator for toxic wastes; in fact he's building a Big Dumb Booster capable of launching a craft to the asteroid belt. Said craft is to be crewed by an enhanced squid, whose immersion in an aqueous environment will offer much protection from radiation. (The rationale for using a squid rather than, say, a robot was the book's weakest plot element, I thought; but I liked the squid so I wasn't complaining.)

Into Malenfant's life comes Cornelius Taine, creepy representative of a shadowy organization called Eschatology whose conviction it is that humankind has at best 200 years to live. This conviction is based on a probabilistic observation (which for the purpose of the novel is called the Carter Catastrophe): if humanity's future stretches for millions or even just hundreds of thousands of years, with a rising or even just a stable population, the odds against any particular individual humans -- you and me -- being alive today, right at the beginning of humankind's story, are infinitesimal. Since we are alive today, the odds must be heavily in favour of humankind's history not having a whole bundle of time left to run. Hm. I know that lots of probabilistic conclusions are strikingly counterintuitive, but even with that in mind I'm not sure I can go along with this one. Surely it's the case that, no matter how long or short human history will be, some humans have to be alive in 2010 -- somebody has to be "it", just in the same way that somebody has to be the one who tosses 100 tails in a row. If it's near-infinitely improbable that I should be born into the species so early in its history, think how unlikely it would be for, say, Shakespeare to have been born into it several hundred years earlier. And the chances are so slender for Plato and Aristotle and Pythagoras that we can say with some confidence that they never existed at all.

Clearly I'm not the only person to regard the Carter Catastrophe as a false conclusion, because Baxter goes to the trouble of including a section (pp117-19) delineating some of the objections that can be raised to it. He does this in the form of a round-robin e-mail reminiscent of the sort of global-warming denialist communiques that come out of wingnut organizations like Newsmax and WorldNewsDaily, and some of the objections are quite clearly intended as specious, but others are less so: "Since no humans of the future are yet alive, it isn't in the least surprising that we aren't among them" (p118); in other words, if the future is short, the probabilities surely shift the other way, so that it becomes unlikely that you or I could be born so near to the end of the species's story. Even so, "No tame expert would stand up and say he or she could demonstrate the damn thing was bullshit in simple enough terms for the president to deliver to the nation, the panicking world" (p120) rings true: it's about time we stopped demanding simple explanations for everything, and took on our responsibility as adults to try to get our heads around complicated ones.

So maybe I'm talking rubbish, just concealing from myself my reluctance to grapple with something complicated . . .

Talking of complicated, back to the book:

Taine and his buddies are convinced that the folk of the future will be sending us back messages (Timescape-style) to tell us how to get round the Carter Catastrophe and thereby allow them to come into existence. If this seems in its turn counterintuitive, it becomes less so if we take on board the Feynmanesque notion that the universe is full of -- indeed, exists because of -- myriads of quantum standing waves that run "simultaneously" both backward and forward in time between pairs of spatiotemporal locations; these past-future-past "handshakes" can occur because "no time passes for a wave traveling at light speed" (p112). If you communicate in such a means with the past in order to effect a change there, you will alter the universe, which will have to repair itself by creating a whole new set of self-consistent past-future-past "handshakes" -- a new future, in simple. And it's using a similar concept -- the "Feynman radio" -- that our heroes set out to try to receive one of those putative messages from the future . . . which of course they do.

The pair of numbers they receive identifies, they eventually realize, the asteroidal body called Cruithne, sometimes called "earth's second moon" because its orbit around the sun is gravitationally linked to ours. Off they send the enhanced squid Sheena to Cruithne, where she discovers -- 2001-style -- an alien artefact: a time portal in the form of a big blue ring. What our chums didn't know when sending her was that she was pregnant; her offspring, aided by little exploration robots, start creating for themselves the beginnings of an industrial civilization on the asteroid. One of the squid, trailed by a camera-bearing exploration 'bot, takes the plunge and goes through the portal . . . to a time 75 million years in the future when Cruithne, long ago slingshot out of solar orbit, can look "down" upon a Galaxy that's obviously been moulded by the activities of intelligent life -- us. Squid and bot repeat the process several times, each time going hugely further into the future, until all that's left of the universe is a degenerated vacuum; this vacuum can, though, be used as a sort of giant, zero-energy computer RAM in which the final humans live immortally as TRON-style constructs.

Malenfant and Taine broadcast the video of all this to the world, which reacts even worse to it all than it did on receiving news of the Carter Catastrophe. The two men decide they must go to Cruithne to investigate for themselves, taking along Malenfant's ex-wife Emma Stoney (who despite not being mentioned above is arguably the novel's central character) and the boy Michael, who's one of the so-called Blue children.

Ah, yes, the Blue children. Here and there all over the world there've been emerging, born of ordinary enough parents, children who're so much more intelligent than the average that they seem like a different species -- the next evolutionary step after Homo sapiens, as it were. The reaction  of us ordinary saps to these children, even sometimes of the children's parents, is one of instinctive loathing. The special schools set up for them have to be closed down eventually, because the staff start mistreating the kids; when the US Govt takes over, promising kindness and delight, that falls apart pretty fast as well. Eventually the kids in one Govt establishment build a magnetic cage capable of trapping a travelling lump of quark matter (think along the lines of neutronium), using it to kill a Fundie staff member who was about to obey the Voice of God by murdering them; the US Govt decides the kids are too dangerous to live, and nukes the establishment. But, when the smoke clears, the kids escape in a jury-rigging craft to the moon . . .

The Blue children are, we begin to gather, another form of messages from the future folk.

Enraged because Malenfant didn't fill in all the requisite forms before setting off to Cruithne, the US Govt despatches a shipful of Marines after them. That ends badly for the Marines, because their craft is attacked first by the squid and then -- terminally -- by Taine. The one surviving Marine does her best to kill our pals; fleeing her, Malenfant grabs the badly injured Stoney and leaps through the time portal and into the first of a long, evolving sequence of universes, each just slightly more structured by its physical laws than the last, that they witness by passing repeatedly through the portal. Finally they make it back to the Cruithne that exists in our own universe and our own time.

Meanwhile another character, a US Senator who's been playing a sort of Best Supporting Actress role through all the other shenanigans, is discovering from the Blue children on the moon yet another timelike idea:

Perhaps, the children seemed to be suggesting, fundamental particles -- electrons and quarks and such -- were actually spacetime defects, kinks in the fabric. For instance, a positive charge could be the mouth of a tiny wormhole threaded by an electric field, with a negative charge the other mouth, the flow of the field through the wormhole looking, from the outside, like a source and sink of charge. [. . .:] The children seemed to be saying that the key was to regard particles not just as loops or folds in space but as folds in time as well. [. . .:] This has clear implications for causality. The properties of a fundamental particle would be determined by measurements that can be made on it only in the future. That is, there is a boundary condition that is in principle unobservable in the present . . . [. . .:] In this worldview it was this breach of causality that provided uncertainty, the famous multivalued fuzziness of the quantum world. (p359)

There's quite a lot of story still to go, including the discovery that the motives of the future folk are entirely different from the ones we'd been guessing. The novel has a sort of Stapledonian relish for big ideas and cosmic consequences. Its appeal comes less through the tale-telling -- Baxter has never been the most fluent of writers, and this applies here too -- and certainly less through the characterization (the first of the various squid is perhaps the most fully realized character of all, which says something about the others; Reid Malenfant is essentially the bastard offspring of Clark Kent and Superman) than through the juggling of mighty concepts: it's quite in keeping that the grand finale should be the initiation of the process that will destroy the universe . . . while birthing its countless "offspring". I confess I found the first half or so of the book to be hard work, and not just because some of the science required me to screw up my face and pout a bit before I could persuade myself I sort of understood it. In the second half, my reading picked up a fair momentum, and by the end I was decidedly breathless . . . and exhausted.

My brain needs some relaxation after that. I think another John Dickson Carr book is called for. ( )

"The last great sf novel of the Millennium" said the publisher's blurb, and indeed I was surprised to see that this had been written as long ago as 1999. Which makes it all the more interesting to see how things actually turned out, seeing as the novel is set in the future year of 2010. I know that sf isn't supposed to be prediction, but sometimes the temptation is just too much...

So what we have here is a maverick wannabe astronaut setting up a space transportation company using discarded Shuttle components after that programme is cancelled. He is planning to establish an asteroid mining operation, with genetically-enhanced squid running the show because they are smaller and easier to transport (and expendable). He is approached by a mysterious stranger who claims to have a forecast of planetary doom which would demands a change of destination...

Meanwhile, children all over the world are suddenly demonstrating massive leaps of scientific achievement out of nowhere.

The depiction of the near-future space enterprise seems very plausible, even with the benefit of hindsight. This, after all, is what Baxter excels in. His characters are a little less well drawn, as they tend to be vehicles to advance the plot - after all, this is a typical big sf "novel of ideas". However, some of the minor characters come out rather better: a female US Congresswoman who investigates the hero's business activities, for instance, or the geek expert in charge of the squid programme spring to mind. The real oddity here is Cornelius, the 'mysterious stranger'; he is quite vividly drawn; indeed, so much so that I began to wonder if he was all he appeared, or whether he would become the subject of some revelation later on in the story. (The answer was no, which makes it odder that Baxter devoted so much time and effort to him - or does he have significance in the later books in the trilogy?)

The iconic "talking squid in outer space", made infamous by Margaret Attwood's dismissal of the entire science fiction genre, have a strong role in the novel. They are perhaps as well drawn as any other characters....

Part-way through the book, there is a major plot turn which sends the whole story in a new direction and sets it into a far wider stage. At one point, four of the main characters find themselves with a ringside seat at the heat death of the universe, over and over again (in a sequence which owed a little, in my mind, to the ending of James Blish's A Clash of Cymbals). We are looking at nothing less than the opening up of the 'manifold' of all possible times and spaces - no-one can accuse Baxter of petty-mindedness! And given that, it transpires that it really doesn't matter that we are looking at the future from yesterday: it is indeed (at one level) a story of a possible future that we never experienced. I shall be interested to see how the events of this book influence the stories that follow in the (thematic) sequels. ( )

Memorable time-jump sequence. Asimovian and Clarkian references.

Highly evolved squid fly to an asteroid with a portal to other universes. Overall brilliant, but a little loose around the edges -- especially the last fifty or so pages traveling through the multiverse. ( )

Wasn't very keen on this one. The initial premise, of future human beings sending a message back to the present day to warn them of catastrophe, is interesting, if hardly original. But the novel was stuffed full of technical stuff which slowed down reading and was saddled with an unlikeable central male character. Developments, technological and plotwise, seemed to happen with unrealistic rapidity. Not a satisfying experience for me and I was quite relieved to finish it. ( )

From the flyleaf: "The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. But as the world's governments turn inward, one man dares to gable on a bolder, brighter future. That man--Reid Malenfant--has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the explorations an colonization of space."

A got this hardback copy several years ago from a generous Freecycler and it sat on my TBR shelf ever since. It's been a while since I've read much SF, but finally got around to reading this one. I very much appreciated the sweeping scope and tremendous amount of science Baster shoehorned into this massive book, but the actual story didn't grab me. The way people reacted to a looming crisis was relentlessly pessimistic and depressing. It might (or not) be an accurate prediction, but it was tough emotional slogging. He pulls off a moderately optimistic ending (I think!)

A writerly trick he uses to good effect: whenever there is heavy science, he has a character who doesn't understand, so the "speaker" has to simplify and analogize. Frequently the stand-in for the reader still doesn't understand, so we don't feel too stupid. I felt the character's name Malenfant ("bad child" in French) was a bit over the top, but I've seen worse. I enjoyed this throwback to my old reading, but I don't think I'll pick up the sequels. ( )

My first book by Stephen Baxter. Could be formulaic; not sure. Need to read the others I bought.
Had trouble with it - just too much happening, too many enormous ideas (made them almost trivial), and some bad clashes with reality, eg hole in a spacesuit which doesn't kill people... ( )

What started off as a pretty dull, sub-Crichton, Space Cowboy type story turned into something much more compelling half way through. You need to persist past the near future 2010 and initially clunky technobabble but then pay-off is worth it; the same mind-bending stuff that Bear and Simmons regularly trade in. ( )

(Reviewed November 10, 2009)

Started poorly, but slowly developed into something really compelling and thought-provoking. The near-future sci-fi stuff is not great, with some pretty laughable predictions, but if you ignore that, you will enjoy this a lot. ( )

Book 1. The three in the series should be read in order.

The three books in the Manifold Trilogy will take you on a mind stretching journey. While the characters are somewhat one-dimensional, they keep you grounded enough to enjoy the science which is presented on an immense scale. Why isn't there any evidence of other sentient life in the universe? What is the purpose of intelligent life at the end of billions of years of evolution. What would the "old ones" do to change things "downstream", to make life more meaningful? Baxter's characters search for the answers to these questions in unique and fascinating ways.

Stimulating, entertaining, and ultimately satisfying. ( )

This was a bit surprising and quite good. It starts out with a Burt Rutan-ish entrepreneur determined to build and launch a space ship, despite the best efforts of the government. He succeeds, and then things get even stranger. ( )

my first impressions are below. upon finishing the book, i'd have to say that Emma became less annoying as the book went on. this is a plot-focused book and not a character-focused one, so once i got over that, it was pretty good. (why is everyone constatly aware of the earth rotating?) i can't say i'm interested enough in the characters to pick up the second book in the series., though i have to add that this one ended with such a cliffhanger that i wouldn't mind seeing what happens next.

cancer? what?

.......

granted I just started the book, but Emma's character is, so far, irritating enough to make want to put this down. i don't buy that a woman who has absolutely no interest in science would follow an ex-husband rocket scientist around only to be constantly lectured to. and my disbelief isn't quelled with a few intermittant "i can't help following my ex around even though its stupid" statements from Emma. Sad thing is, Malenfant's lectures to Emma are actually interesting... I just wish that Emma wasn't so obvious a literary device whose purpose is only to get the background knowledge across to the reader. the premise is interesting enough for me to probably keep reading, but so far... Emma's irritating me to the core. tell me there's more to her, guys, or tell me she gets blown up somewhere or abandoned on an asteroid ( )

http://comunidadumbria.com/?MW=3&SW=5&ACCION=D&CODIGO=186 ( )

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3HM19CIKHJ6HK/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm ( )

This series is so interesting because Baxter is thinking on such a grand scale. He's not just tweaking a little bit - he's conceiving of huge alternative realities. I liked the challenge of thought that these books put out there. ( )

Very exciting agenda. Far more than entertainment. ( )