Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $2.40 You Save: $5.59 (70%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Manifold: Time
Book Review: Fairly Rotten
Summary: 1 Stars
So, after reading a slew of post modern fantastic reality/mythic stuff by Gaiman, Meiville and others, I was in the mood for a good hard science fiction book. Stay with me...so I figure, you know, I keep hearing about this Baxter guy...He's even won science fiction awards and such. Plus, I love "time" stories (think Connie Willis). So I picked up this "Manifold:Time" thing. The thing is, it had a neat looking paperback cover too. Let me tell you - think twice before you make a similar choice. This "story" (and I'm using the word generously) is nothing more than a painfully dull exercise in rehashing all the recent Hawking-type physics speculation that's been going around. The plot, if you can call it one, follows a ultra wealthy space advocate trying to save the human race from an earth-bound destiny. Geeze...Baxter throws in an ex-wife who just can't forsake her super-rich hubby, some emotionally devoid autistic kids, and a handful of super geeks who really have no business in the plot other to endlessly explain scientific theories to the more mentally challenged "characters" (and us, the readers, evidently). In fact, ALL the characters are emotionally void - not only the ones with autism. The most interesting person in the entire story was a squid...
But, don't get me wrong - if you like page after page of plotless, characterless scientific banter of a speculative nature, by all means buy this book...
Book Review: Fascinating Stuff
Summary: 4 Stars
There's a lot in this book to both engross and frustrate a reader, but I think the plusses significantly outweigh the minuses. "Manifold: Time" is full of fascinating ideas and richly imagined scenarios. I don't know if this is because of the limitations of my thinking or of Baxter's writing, but I often found myself unable to understand his quantum physics for dummies sections. No matter: his weaving together the complexities of time and space utterly fascinating, and if I don't understand how things work, I feel confident that he understands it and is giving us good scientific theory.The book centers on the idea of doom. Is the earth doomed within the next two hundred years? If the universe itself is doomed to destruction with the next multi-trillion of years, what does it all matter anyhow, since we have no future if the universe has no future? Baxter does an amazing job of making the ultimate end of the universe seem both poignant and sad. He spices his story with lots of inviting threads, such as the mysterious, super smart "blue" children, and the increasing intelligent genetically engineered squids, and, of course, the fate of everything.
His human characters, by comparison, suffer. I never really care about the people in this book nor completely believe and/or understand their motivations. When the theory, based entirely on statistics, that the earth is doomed in the next two centuries, is released, people turn to rioting in the streets. I found that unlikely. On the other hand, all of this is window dressing for Baxter's big ideas, and I found myself turning the pages and staying up late to see where it was all going.
Not a perfect book, but a good one and a worthwhile one. It has left me wanting to read the sequels, but perhaps not right away.
Book Review: Feynman radio from the future: This book is good.
Summary: 5 Stars
When you have probabilistic doomsday predictions, intelligent squids, Feynman radios (to pick up signals from the future) etc. - thrown at you, it could easily have been just a lot of weird stuff that seemed pretty far removed from anything you could relate to. Not so in Stephen Baxters "time". Here it all seems pretty logical and inevitable. Surely, some future Malenfant guy will genetically enhance a squid brain, and then let the squid control a spaceship instead of some old computer. And surely the squid will rebel and try to get back to Earth with its giant Oceans and lots of room to breed.... Brilliant stuff and thats just just the prelude! I read all 456 pages in one session. Simply I just had to know what would happen next....Book Review: Forget the Fiction, Enjoy the Science
Summary: 2 Stars
Baxter wrote some very good descriptions of science knows or theorizes now in 2001. The major irritation is that he had to put a plot and make it fictionalized. As the Afterword shows, the major concepts described are real and have been talked about in the major scientific journels. The asteroid is real and the "Carter Catastrophe" is at least theoretically possible (or at least, not ruled out completely), and squid are really quite intelligent for invertibrates. In the speeches he gives his characters, Baxter presents the most mind-numbing concepts in a clear manner. That said, it's the plot. The characters do things that make no logical sense. A billionaire, Reid Malenfant, decides to cobble together a space ship in a manner of months and genetically craft squid to do the driving. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Scrooge MacDuck couldn't and wouldn't even attempt something as off-the-wall as that and do it in a few months. A strange mathemetician pops up and claims the "intelligences" from the far future are attempting to communicate with us Earthlings. Go to this particular asteroid and, voila, our billionaire reconfigures this extremely expensive venture to a whole new target. Again, in a in a short amount of time.
Baxter, having read Clarke's superior Childhood's End, has these genius kids cropping up all over the place saying things that a Cal Tech Physicist would have trouble understanding. Are these kids good, bad, or Profoundly Evil. Baxter never quite explains that. There certainly isn't much in the way of to find out. And the squid, suddenly evolved to super-intellectual status, they could max out the SAT too. Are they good, bad, or Profoundly Evil, too? You get the feeling when a sizable portion of them cobble together super-spaceships out of an asteroid decide to decamp out near Jupiter that maybe we are better off without them.
Malenfant seems to have a profound God-complex. He gets profoundly depressed when on a jaunt through the Complete History of the Universe finds out that, no matter what, in ten to the one-to-the-one-hundred-and-sixteen years, Humanity or whatever intelligence evolves, will die out. He thus decides to help or at least condone the euthanization of the entire cosmos which the superkids, now living on the moon, are going to do. Jean Luc Picard would have at least waxed eloquent in defense of Humanity. I found the overall storyline to be profoundly depressing. Nevertheless, the Science was right on target.
Book Review: Good Science, Good Story, but...
Summary: 4 Stars
Manifold: Time is filled with some good scientific stuff, especially if you have an interest in quantum mechanics and similar fields but don't know much about them. It also presents some theories that are a bit more...let's say, wacky.The story is also interesting. The plot itself was fairly interesting, and the way in which it is written - by continually switching viewpoints - keeps you on your toes. It tackles some neat concepts and in the end, comes out ok.
There a few problems, the largest of which is that the book has light material for a very, very heavy subject. This is a fun romp through off-the-beaten path science by an crazy billionaire mixed with apocalypse theories, the purpose of humanity, and characters that could have been drawn out far better. All of those are interesting (well, maybe not the last item), but do not mix well.
It also brings up some neat ideas about the need for children (and the need of parents to have them) which I felt could have been brought out a bit more.
In the end, a fun read, but I'd suggest one of the Xelee Sequence books (Ring, Flux, Raft...) for first-time Baxter readers.
Saltz