A race of microscopic beings, who were genetically engineered to survive on the turbulent mantle of a neutron star and who vividly remember their superbeing creators, prepare for the biggest family reunion in history. Reprint.
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Editorial Reviews
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'Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein succeeded in doing it, but very few others. Now Stephen Baxter joins their exclusive ranks -- writing science fiction in which the science is right, the author knowledgeable, and the extrapolations a sheer pleasure to read, admire, enjoy. The reaction is that which C.S. Lewis referred to when he described science fiction as the only genuine consciousness-expanding drug. Flux is a highly imaginative and moving novel .. It is a rare thing to find such a good read. Wonderful stuff!' Harry Harrison, New Scientist 'Flux puts Stephen Baxter in the front line of world-spinners.' The Times
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From the Publisher
'The best SF author in Britain' -SFX
'Flux puts Stephen Baxter in the top league of the world-spinners' - The Times
'Stephen Baxter proves what a cosmic thinker he is' - Washington Post Book World
'Baxter has emerged as a master of cosmological hard SF, a writer enamored of alien viewpoints and radical settings, with a sense of sublime immensities and an ingenuity at working permutations on the question of what is human' - Locus --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Baxter has vision, but it's blurred,
By Christopher (Cincinnati, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Flux (Mass Market Paperback)
This is the second Baxter book I've read (after VACUUM DIAGRAMS), and like the first it's a mix of brilliance and disappointment.Baxter unquestionably has the wildest hard-physics imagination in the business. The world depicted in FLUX is a staggering conceptual achievement, taking the amazing concept of neutron-star life first suggested by Frank Drake and developed by Robert L. Forward in DRAGON'S EGG & STARQUAKE and going one step further, creating an ecosystem within the neutron-superfluid mantle of the star and exploring its whole geography from crust to core. The biology, locomotion and senses of the inhabitants are well worked out. But Baxter's imagination tends to outrace even him. In both his books I've read, there have been major flaws in logic, points on which he failed to think his ideas through. Here, for story convenience, he asserts that the nuclear-size humanoids' life and thought processes happen at normal human speed. Readers of Forward will see the absurdity of this. The nucleonic processes on which this life is based are a million times faster than chemistry, because the particles are so much closer together. Even if it were possible to slow these people's life cycles so much in proportion to the underlying processes, they'd be agonizingly slower than the native organisms around them, living on a slower timescale than even the plants. There are other moments of shortsightedness; sometimes he describes them in humanlike ways incompatible with the anatomy and physics he's defined. (How could Dura have "slick palms" when they don't perspire?) When the reason for these micro-humans' creation is finally revealed, it doesn't make sense. It would've been more logical to build mindless robots for the task, and ones better-designed to fit the environment. The creators' choice to make them almost exactly human down to the same impractical anatomy and the same emotions and aspirations shows a sentimentalism fiercely incompatible with the project's goals. Baxter also gets confused about the scale of his trademark structure, Bolder's Ring. In VACUUM DIAGRAMS he said it was millions of light-years across -- yet described an attack on its rim affecting its center instantaneously, and described a distant observer seeing the battle across its whole width in real time. And here, he describes it appearing tiny from a distance of mere thousands of light-years. Baxter seems to have trouble realizing the physical and temporal scope of his own creations. His imagination is bigger than his judgment. Baxter's a far better writer than Forward, but as in Forward's books, the plot is basically an excuse for illustrating the environment and physics. His characters have a modicum of emotion and personality, unlike Forward's, but are sometimes superficially drawn and hard to get a handle on. The one sexual interlude is painfully awkward and gratuitous from a character standpoint, serving only to illustrate the mechanics of the act for this species. (And let's not go into Baxter's seeming obsession with bodily functions. He could've chosen a more pleasant term for biological jet-propulsion.) Amid the superlatively exotic setting, the society is relentlessly ordinary and unimaginative. The sociological storyline replays the mythology of countless British WWII films (and American films about Britain, such as MRS. MINIVER) -- a stratified society is torn apart by disaster and becomes united, promising to rebuild as an egalitarian utopia. It's tacked on quite awkwardly here. Overall, Baxter pulls the reader in two different directions -- in the environment and physics he strives for unimagined wonders, but for the people and society he pulls against that and forces them to be as mundane and familiar as possible. FLUX portrays the most extraordinarily alien, yet credibly developed, physical environment I have ever seen in SF. But this just throws the book's flaws and its ordinary storytelling into sharp relief. And Baxter's failure to think through all the ramifications of his own ideas, and the huge logic gaffes that result, are a continual frustration.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strengths far outweigh weaknesses- terrific science,
By A Customer
This review is from: Flux (Mass Market Paperback)
The review by Christopher is articulate and accurate regarding the imperfect story in Flux. However the environment and senario are so wonderfully drawn and described that weaknesses in the story are a minor distraction in the work of the facinating author.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Humanity Prevails,
By A Customer
This review is from: Flux (Mass Market Paperback)
Flux is only one of several books in the Xeelee sequence and does exactly what those other novels and numerous short stories do for this magnificent saga. It adds to its complexity, enlarging the vastness of the sequence by adding yet another layer to this magnificent, time engulfing Story. Much of the book stands on its own (appart from carefully added references to the other books, I especially enjoyed Parz City, a reference to a character in Timelike Infinity). Throughout the novel the reader knows, as do the neutron star's inhabitants, that they were put there by Humans. Only in the end does the reader learn why this was so. These micro-people were implanted into the star and sent on a multimillenial journey only to arrive at the Ring (the final Xeelee book). There they were intended to take their place in the great war and ensure that the neutron star would continue in a direct impact course with the Ring, hoping to destroy it. True humanity prevails. Find out how.gv
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