Customer Reviews

Manifold: Space

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Absolutley loved this novel. The shear depth of Baxters' ideas and his firm grasp of the latest cutting edge physics, is a joy to read. I loved Mainifold: Time, but this one I couldn't put down. What I love most about this novel is that you realise your learning something while enjoying every page. Personally, I have no problems with Baxters' characterizations and writing style, I think he's one of the best in hard SF ( generally better than Egan or Bear, in my opinion). To summarize what this novel is about, while not giving too much away- imagine a thought experiment concerning the Fermi Paradox, e.g if aliens exist, why aren't they here? This paradox could have lots of solutions, e.g life is very,very rare, or perhaps life is common but it gets wiped out or wipes itself out in a relatively short time scale... This novel seems to take the latter angle, space is brimming with life, yet none of it every really gets the chance to advance beyond a certain point. What's behind all this is the crux of the story. Loved the ending as well.

Highly recommended.

Not that I'll be misunderstood: I'm one of Mr Baxters biggest fans and most loyal readers, but "Manifold:Space" lacks a very important quality of a book: a coherent story that keeps the reader interested. Characters and their achievements light up for a few chapters and then disappear again in the vast maw of time.
"The most awesome ideas in science fiction today" rates "The Times" on the cover of my UK edition. That is not untrue - but unlike in "Manifold:Time", here Mr Baxter fails to weave those ideas into a gripping story - I repeatedly had to force myself to continue reading. Of course it is way more difficult to tell a story that spans centuries and millenia than one that only stretches the protagonist's lifetime and maybe it is the problem of us "mayfly humans" (compared to those mechanical aliens described in the book that "live" for millenia) that we find it hard to follow such eternal-like periods of time - but hey: we're the only life-form yet that can read (his) books ! And in "Time" Mr Baxters'ideas about the future of the universe and mankind as a part of it were at least as awesome as in "Space" - and nonetheless it was a thrilling, page-turning story. I hope that the proposed third one in this sequence, "Manifold:Origin", will take up the quality of "Time" and - although hardly possible, since its his best - "The Time Ships".

Baxter's Space is the Gulliver's Travels of modern science fiction. I mean this not only in terms of narrative convention (hapless traveler is propelled from one tableaux to the next to showcase the author's agenda, in this case, a grab-bag of the myriad forms life might take in various environments), but of repute, as well: with Time as his launching point, Baxter takes cyclopean strides, earning the hallmark "classic" and instantly vaulting into my Top Ten Greatest Sci-Fi Novels of All Time. Baxter has come a long way from what I label the "pajama sci-fi" of his Xeelee sequence: cheeseball crews running around in their jammy-jams like something from Star Trek: the Motion Picture or Invaders from Plan 9. Baxter's ideas were always there, but his Michael Crichton School of bland prose was a great detraction. No more - he's battened down the hatches on sloppy writing, his characters have distinct voices, and the greatest improvement of all, his dialogue has gone from Vaudevillian melodrama to the downright profound. Baxter refreshingly skips hashing out the trials of his characters and gets to the nitty gritty: one sentence, Malefant is reasoning out how he can get to a deep space "Saddle Point," the next sentence, he's there, and who cares how he swung it?

All this, and the ideas are still there; each chapter bursts with an astonishing new Big Idea that forces one to pause and give a Keanu Reeves "whoah." The final onslaught of the Cracker fleet and Nemoto's soliloquy is the most deliciously bleak scene I have read in sci-fi since the end of Orwell's 1984. Here's hoping Baxter's Darwinian vision of space colonization is totally wrong. I, for one, am still waiting for enlightened beings to descend from the heavens and help us save us from ourselves.

Space is not perfect - the micronized space-ship with no plausible explanation from a race that Baxter repeatedly stresses has comparatively primitive technology is particularly irksome, and Baxter can sometimes hit you over the head to make his point (there's no need to use "Darwinian" as an adjective twice on the same page - I get it already), but these are minor annoyances. It's the power to make you cower like an insignificant mote against the howling void, to go slack-jawed with wonder and awe as you gaze out over alien vistas, to make you still ask after witnessing 10,000 years of human evolution, "Is that all there is?" Baxter dishes it up in droves and he's unlikely to pull it off again, so if you're going to read only one, this is it.

Finally, my glib answer to the Fermi Paradox: we exist, but we're not there...

Fudo Myo
Geneva, Switzerland

I was astounded by Stephen Baxter's first novel in the Manifold duo, Manifold: Time. Honestly, I enjoyed Time more than Space, but Manifold: Space is truly just as fascinating.

Baxter has a wonderful job with his ability to flawlessly write true hard science fiction that incorporates real science into the story. He has done a beautiful job with Space.

I would also like to note that if you are expecting to read Manifold: Time in this book, you will be disappointed. Space is a totally new story with new characters, and even a new Malenfant, for we also have a new universe (and NO, that is NOT a spoiler)! I will say that Space's plot unfolds similarly stylistically, but the story is a totally original and new sci fi experience that is equally magnificent to that of Time.

This is truly a book for all science fiction lovers. I guarantee it! Enjoy!

-Taylor

Better than the prior Manifold Time, and a classic hard sci-fi novel. If you liked books like Eon (Bear), and you're into "real" scientific theory woven into the fabric of a ripping yarn, you'll dig this book! Quantum physics, space objects, aliens, and vaulting concepts. Nicely structured to open the door for a third book featuring the character since each iteration seems to adjust the nature of reality somewhat, with the birth and death of "everything as we know it." I couldn't put it down! :)

I really looked forward to reading this book after having read Manifold Time ! I haven't been disappointed ! This is absolutely great, this books drives you everywhere in the universe on an immense time scale, it's breath-taking from the beginning to the end ! Manifold Time was based on the Carter catastrophe, here it's based on Fermi's Paradox, and explores every detail of the question. So well written. Stephen Baxter is really talented, i can't wait the the third book of the Manifold series !! BUY IT NOW !

This book is worth reading for the interesting discussions concerning sublight space travel and even gives a scientific explanation for teleportation. However, the author fails to give satisfying motivations for the political institutions and characters. ETS are discovered in the asteriod belt, but no government sends a probe or a manned visit. Aliens threathen to invade the solar system, but no human or government is willing to put up a defense. Instead, humans relie on a group of ETS to defend the home system for 500 years; the same group of ETS that had to buy an x-ray weapon from the humans earlier in the novel. Other parts of the novel seemed to defy logic- The teleportation gates are not affected by an event that erases all other biological and constructed material from the galaxy; an old woman mounts a better defense of our solar system than a fleet of ETS. Readers who love "hard" SF will like this novel. People who like more character development or military SF will not be as pleased.

This is the first book I read of Baxter and it got me interested in all his other books. I am sci-fi and astronomy passionate and find some of these ideas very original. I know many people here complained about the characters in the book, but if you forget about them for a moment , since their only purpose is to take you from one era to another, you will find a book rich of interesting and original ideas. At some points the books is scary and seems very negative, no matter how hard you try to make a difference some natural or unnatural forces will always be stronger than you, but I believe the overall message is that we should look inside ourselves and find the strenght to help others even beyong time. This is the problem with humanity, we only focus on "us" and "now" and Baxter makes of this problem the topic of his book. Great reading if you like sci-fi, but you might appreciate it even if you're not that big in sci-fi stories.

What little science is involved in this fiction book is so muddled and over-stated as to make it the most tedious and boring repletion of worthless and ill-proven ideas I have ever seen compiled into one story-line. I have stopped reading this book four times now, and I am still not even close to the termination of its worthlessness. Don't start.

(If you're not here for a spoiler, don't read past the spoiler line!)

If you're looking for jarheads in space, egyptian aliens, pod races and feel good endings about humankind's unique humanity you can step away now.

The rest of you can face the bloody harsh wind of Baxter's second attempt at explaining the Fermi paradox: if life just happens, why have we only found it on our planet? The book takes a long, descriptive path through the next few thousand years, painting on a grand scale what's going on in our stellar neighborhood. Relatively convincing quasi physics are woven into a surreal picture of space/time travelers, incomprehensible aliens, resource struggles on a ridiculous scale, and ultimately a cold, cold, unfortunately teetering universe.

The payoff for sticking with this very deliberately paced revelation of the universe's mechanical heart is gaining a moment of clarity where you get to pose yourself the question: If the universe is "just" the universe, sans the metaphysical we've imagined, if it really is just a big cooling explosion and we're just bizarre knots in the eddies of cooling gasses... do waffles and bacon still taste good?


***** HERE BE SPOILERS *****

For those who'd like a few more details before committing to the book:
Malenfant is back, and ends up with a key role again. He isn't the same Malenfant, just as this isn't the same universe as the first Manifold book. The idea here seems to be that Baxter is using each book to explore another answer to the Fermi paradox. Some of the first book's characters make cameos here, but there's a new cast to make room for too.

This time around, the answer to the paradox revolves around the idea that life does happen all over the place, but it gets wiped out all the time. This seems to happen on a period that allows for a sufficiently high degree of sophistication that the relics of those civilizations are incomprehensible to us. Baxter would like us to picture the idea that sufficiently advanced resource plundering is indistinguishable from geology. As with the first book, he also casually tosses star engineering out there as part of his mechanism. Given the nature of the relics, the timescales involved, and the thoroughness of the "reboot" function, he paints a convincing picture of why we aren't seeing any evidence of others in the sky.

As per the first book, we follow our ragged collection of human observers out to the stars to observe all of this first hand en route to the melancholy final reveal. The pacing is slow and Baxter spends what feels like more time describing every nut and bolt compared to the first book. Given that the whole point of the book is to paint you a picture of this tragic universe though, this really is only a bad thing if you have a short attention span.

The punchline, the bit about our part to play, is refreshing. No magic invoked here, no triumph of vague spirit or ill defined virtue. Baxter calls us out for being what we manifestly demonstrate ourselves to be rather than what we'd like to think we are, and finds a use for it!

I very much enjoyed this book. Two thumbs (flecked with maple syrup) up.