Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Manifold: Time
Book Review: A Good "Ad Astra" Novel from Stephen Baxter
Summary: 4 Stars
Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time, the first novel of his Manifold series, is a reading experience which has filled me with perfect wonder & curiosity. Mr. Baxter has skillfully drawn the galactic course of book 1 with spell-binding treats: an ambitious theme of galactic urgency in which ALL the right questions regarding the cosmic destiny of all living things are asked; a "doomsday" plot that begins with a dying planet Earth & an unaware human population of the year 2010; current issues in theoretical physics which will help the human race answer these Big Questions & ponder a vast space-time Challenge from which all Life arises.There's more. Sheena generation ships - smart squid forced by human Mind to meet this Cosmic Challenge - reproductively gains more Mind through the multigenerations & leaves a beloved ocean planet behind forever; humanity's globally - oppressive attempts to control the inevitability of Change; the brilliant - and feared - Blue Children. Like Sheena 5, the enhanced squid, these genius youngsters must pay dearly - with possibly their lives - for the rebirth of the Cosmos.
On to the main human characters: Reid Malenfant, roguish daredevil ex-astronaut. Man of wealth & founder of Bootstrap. He will take mankind to the stars...and beyond... despite very powerful enemies in government & industry.
Along with Malenfant travels his former wife Emma Stoney as the level-headed voice of reason & conscience. A third party will be the mysterious, obsessive, mad-genius physicist/businessman Cornelius Taine. He, too, will journey with Malenfant to the planet Earth's second moon to decipher the future: to seek out mankind's true destiny. Another of the human spacefarers is Michael, an African blue child...despised...a child of remarkable genius who is destined to help Malenfant meet the Challenge. Maura Della is the unwitting politician who is drawn into Malenfant's "crazy" schemes.
Read this book for yourself to partake in the Glory of Ideas that is Manifold:Time. Space-time will become for you, as it has for me, a wholly odd & vast cosmic tool. Reid Malenfant, along with the help of an intriguing supporting cast, studies it; uses it. And travels forever to the Stars.
Book Review: A Modern Science Fiction Masterpiece!
Summary: 5 Stars
Manifold: Time is simply one of the best modern science fiction novels that I've had the pleasure to read in a long time. I thoroughly enjoyed it.Manifold: Time tells the story of Reid Malenfant, his ex-wife Emma Stoney, and a mysterious mathematician that unexpectantly walks into their lives with suggestions of grandeur that turns out to be horribly true about our (Earth's) near future. If you read the back blurb of the book, don't be surprised if the story unfolds in a completely different manner.
Stephen Baxter has created a hard-hitting, massively entertaining work-out-of-a-sf-novel that will truly leave you gasping for air as its pace plunders ahead. Baxter reminds me of Robert J. Sawyer (of Factoring Humanity and Calculating God fame) in the way that he can seamlessly combine actual science with fully realized characters with sci fi. This is a wonderful read and I HIGHLY RECOMMEND it. In fact, go out and buy it now; for I guarantee it won't disappoint! Enjoy!
-Taylor
Book Review: A fun read with a few science glitches
Summary: 5 Stars
I thoroughly enjoyed this book (although I'm thankful I bought the paperback version rather than the hardback). Some of the reviewers complain about shallow characters, but so much of great sci-fi is about mind-blowing ideas and sweeping vistas, rather than character development. It's brain candy - light entertainment. Witness so many of Larry Niven's highly entertaining novels and short stories, where big ideas overshadow the characters. Having said that, there are a few problems with some of Baxter's plot devices. The Carter Catastrophe, while alarming, is based on faulty logic. Using this reasoning, an individual born at any time in human history might deduce that a population collapse is imminent if he or she observes that the population has been growing exponentially. But clearly we haven't experienced an endless series of population reductions throughout history. And how can we assume that individuals are "randomly assigned" to live in a certain era, let alone as a human being as opposed to a bacterium or a beetle, etc.?
Another issue: in the last pages of the novel, Malenfant and Michael are observing the demise of the solar system from a location 5 A.U. outside of the plane of the solar system. However, if the wave front of destruction is traveling out at the speed of light from its origin on the Moon, then our characters wouldn't be able to observe the devastation, since the wave front would in fact PRECEDE the images of the destroyed Moon and the Earth. They would see a perfectly peaceful solar system, and then a sudden flash of light that cooks them in less than a second. I don't know. Maybe they could somehow use wormhole telescopes or something . . . it's just a minor qualm from an excellent novel.
Book Review: A must miss
Summary: 1 Stars
Only read this book if you like cardboard characters, flawed premises, whiny pseudo-spiritual nonsense and don't need a plot to keep your interest. The real point of this book is for the author to hypothesize about how a far-future civilization might harness every possible watt of energy in a dying universe, and to whine about the non-eternal nature of the universe. The central them is that a thousand-trillion years of existence isn't enough and that life is only worth living if the life-span of the universe is eternal. Yeah, it doesn't make sense in the book either.
The characters are cardboard...of the worst sort. We have central casting's hero/industrialist right out of Ayn Rand, his sycophantic (ex)wife who improbably follows him into space, the know-it-all mystic advisor who is always right, and the genius children who everyone brutally abuses..for no apparent reason. None of these characters have personalities beyond their central casting role, their voices are identical and most of them are superfluous to the story.
The premises are flawed, for example if a generation of geniuses are born, every culture on the planet will respond by locking them in concentration camps and brutally abusing them. Sure, Steve, lot of precedent for that in history... Wait, here's a better one: Do you realize it is more cost effective to send a mission into space using surplus space-shuttle components and old airline navigation systems (Loran anyone...?) than it is to use commercially available lift vehicles? Oh, and you can save even more by skipping tests...that's where NASA went wrong. Just patch the parts together with bailing wire and ignite the engines because that is a more efficient way to reach space. Wait...another of Steve's clever cost saving premises: breed a new species of super-smart squid, train them to perform the mission, launch a full deep-sea biosphere to support the squid...yes, this is sure to be less costly than sending humans into space with caned air and freeze-dried food using mature, highly reliable technologies. I kid you not, these are central premises of the book.
Anyway, it gets worse from there. My advice: read the short essay up front, it's interesting, then go find something better to read.
Book Review: A really dumb idea
Summary: 1 Stars
Caution, Spoilers Ahead
This is a really awful book--one of the few truly laughable works of recent so-called "hard"science fiction. While there are a lot of unrelated sub plots (with some admittedly interesting scientific "what if's,") the real plot line is simplistic, preposterous, muddle-headed and just downright offensive. In Baxter's hypothetical near future, people of the future somehow reach back in time to create a bunch of super intelligent children whose mission (we find in the end, after countless red herrings) is...wait for it...to destroy the universe! But, these kids are not the bad guys, because (in Baxter's view) the "heat death" of the universe is somehow intolerable to the human spirit. Thus, by destroying the universe ("It's the wrong universe!" exclaims one of the children) a new one with different physical laws will be created in its place; and even though everybody in the old universe dies a terrible death, it's ok because the new universe will somehow recreate the human mind and we will all live happily ever after in a universe that is eternal, set free of the horrible laws of thermodynamics.
This is about the loopiest idea for a science fiction story I've ever heard. It also puts Baxter squarely in the camp of the "we-are-the-only-intelligent-life-in-the-universe" crowd. As you may know, there are two lines of thought on extraterrestrial intelligence: "we are alone" is one; and "we are not alone" is the other. The math and statistics of each is camp points, not to a right or wrong analysis of the data, but rather insufficient data. It's an argument tantamount to the existence of God, with both sides stridently arguing their obvious correctness.
In any case, this novel is pure drivel, with an idiotic premise, and an idiotic conclusion.