Manifold: Space [Mass Market Paperback]

Stephen Baxter (Author)

Book Description

Series: Manifold | Publication Date: January 2, 2002

The year is 2020. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, Reid Malenfant ventures to the far edge of the solar system, where he discovers a strange artifact left behind by an alien civilization: A gateway that functions as a kind of quantum transporter, allowing virtually instantaneous travel over the vast distances of interstellar space. What lies on the other side of the gateway? Malenfant decides to find out. Yet he will soon be faced with an impossible choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself. Meanwhile on Earth the Japanese scientist Nemoto fears her worst nightmares are coming true. Startling discoveries reveal that the Moon, Venus, even Mars once thrived with life?life that was snuffed out not just once but many times, in cycles of birth and destruction. And the next chilling cycle is set to begin again . . .

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Baxter's work reminds us all what science fiction is truly about."
--GREG BEAR
   Author of Darwin's Radio


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

The year is 2020. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, Reid Malenfant ventures to the far edge of the solar system, where he discovers a strange artifact left behind by an alien civilization: A gateway that functions as a kind of quantum transporter, allowing virtually instantaneous travel over the vast distances of interstellar space. What lies on the other side of the gateway? Malenfant decides to find out. Yet he will soon be faced with an impossible choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself. Meanwhile on Earth the Japanese scientist Nemoto fears her worst nightmares are coming true. Startling discoveries reveal that the Moon, Venus, even Mars once thrived with life?life that was snuffed out not just once but many times, in cycles of birth and destruction. And the next chilling cycle is set to begin again . . .

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: Del Rey (January 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345430786
• ISBN-13: 978-0345430786
• Product Dimensions: 4.2 x 1.1 x 6.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #806,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The mankind: A loop evolution?, April 18, 2002

By 

Hector Matute (Caracas, Venezuela) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Manifold: Space (Mass Market Paperback)

I gave 4 stars to this book because the theme is very interesting; Baxter worked on an Earth threatened by an exponencial colonization wave coming from the deep space (directed by an allien especies called "crackers"). The concept is very original and is based in the fact that if the live flourish in almost every star system, in the most incredibles ways, is possible that the rate of growth of the population forces to colonize several stellar systems to survive, and in this process some worlds,inhabited or no, can be destroyed or exploited.
In this book Baxter speculates on the possibility of several processes of colonization like this one, happened through aeons and our system including our own planet has been affected previously.
All this is exciting, but the long periods of time included into the book make a little difficult to tie all the facts exposed. We can find some weakeness in some arguments like:
- If our evolution process was "restarted" in some time, securely our start point was very different and possibly our ancestors could had very different physical characteristics (Depending on the moment at which the Earth was affected). Into the book we find things like pre-historic animals, dinosaurs and Neardenthals returned to the life by the Gaijims to prevent the mankind extintion and start again. This sounds like a Gaijims eternal manipulationd that it is not sufficiently clarified.
- Nemoto is alive after centuries with medical manipulation, and is as if she had a secret for this known by nobody - not mentioned.
- The mankind lost all inventive, curiosity, technological advance, religions, with the incomming alliens (sound incredible to me).
..
Despite the previous details, i did enjoy the book, and found positive technical aspects like the accretion disc in a binary star system with a black hole, speculations about how would be the vision of the stars from a distant star system; so, I believe that something good can be found in the new book: Manifold- Origin.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Manifold arghhhhhh!, October 9, 2005

By 

Michael Battaglia - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Manifold: Space (Mass Market Paperback)

I think I would really enjoy a physics class taught by Mr Baxter, since the man clearly knows his science, knows which sources to go to and is able to synthesize them in ways that he can explain them without your head exploding. Also, he's able to extrapolate those ideas into some interesting scenarios that suggest some fun possibilities and open the mind up for more speculation. Alas, he's not able to translate that yet into novels with real emotional heft and the bigger his ideas get, the more the story tends to leave you behind. This book is the follow-up to Manifold: Time and as the title implies, while this book still requires great leaps in time, this time out we're more about moving outward than jumping forward. Jumping off the conclusions set by the last novel, Baxter essentially hits the reboot button and drops us in a totally different universe, although some of the characters are still the same. The most notable is our hero Reid Malenfant, who is older than the first book but just as obsessed with mankind securing their destiny beyond the stars. Instead of wondering how we're going to survive, however, he's more interested in why they aren't any other intelligent races in the galaxy, or at least why it seems that way. Meanwhile, an intelligent race does apparently decide to move into the solar system from far away and that's where the fun starts. Always willing to boldly go (split infinitive and everything), Reid disappears into a portal that was left by some prior alien race and the voyage of discovery begins. As I mentioned before, Baxter is fiend when it comes to idea and everything is well thought out. From the weird robot-like Gajin that show up, to all the other aliens that pop in every so often, to the effects of time and history when extrapolated thousands upon thousands of years into the future, it's like he's taking you through an exhibit hall in his mind, showcasing all the fun science-based ideas he has and dressing them up as science-fiction. However, it doesn't take long before the reader quickly starts to lose the plot and everything begins to drown in a sea of glorious information. There are gates that allow people to travel but since it's lights-speed, time dilation still applies and when they come back to Earth, it's hundreds of years in the future each time, leading to effects that aren't much different from what the soldier suffered in Joe Haldemann's famous The Forever War, namely culture shock and the sense of dissociation and alienation. Things progress and Baxter shows us people on the moon, people on different planets, different aliens in other star systems, the galaxy, the picture keeps blowing up bigger and bigger until you almost can't contain it. But we don't really ever find out what it all means. The cover copy on the back of the book suggests that the main thrust of the plot has something to do with the reasons why intelligent life flares up and then dies out, leaving artifacts scattered all around the galaxy that other races pick up on, and Baxter sprinkles plenty of hints that the solar system was previously used by other races for various purposes, but it's buried under such a sea of static that it's hard to sort through it all. Especially since Baxter seems to be acting like an excited child, throwing each new idea in our face almost as he comes up with it, "You like this? Well how about this? Or this? Or even this?" until you're almost numb from it. By the time he gets around to answering the central question, almost five hundred pages later, you're been dazzled by as many marvels as science can handle but feeling strangely empty at the same time. It almost feels like "Who cares?" and regardless of anything else, I doubt that's the reaction he intended. Still, he gets an A for effort and the individual moments are extraordinary, showing that he's a mind possessed of a far vision and the fact that he's able to take all this knowledge and assemble it into something resembling a story is amazing in itself. But when you add it all up, it's not quite everything it's supposed to be. Hard science junkies will probably eat it up like the candy it is, everyone else looking for slightly more emotional content may find it rough going at times but for anyone who wants to see if all those complicated ideas that involve words with too many letters actually might mean something, well this is as good a place to start as any.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hope for our future, December 6, 2005

By 

David Brockert "constant reader" (Madison, Wisconsin) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Manifold: Space (Mass Market Paperback)

This is an odd story. It develops into a quest for the meaning of life. I enjoyed it's start: China and Japan have taken the lead in space exploration because the United States has not shown the desire to put money into such ventures. Then there is the time traveling aspect: going through portals to other systems takes the time it takes for light to travel, so rather then instantenous appearance, it is five or six years to get there and the same amount to get back. Rather simple, but no one has mentioned it before.
The ending is a treat, a bit unsatisfying because you want to see happiness and success, and it is there in a sense, it is not what you expect.