52 of 53 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mind candy you can get your teeth into, October 26, 2003
(***1/2)
This first volume of Baxter's "Manifold" triad is a tour de force of exposition masquerading as fiction. The writing is plenty lively enough, but this is the kind of hard s-f (one of the more satisfying kinds, for my money) in which the plot consists less in what happens to our heroes than in what dawns on them.
The characters themselves are two dimensional figures, stolen from old Heinlein stock, elitist and tiresomely self-confident and too crammed with genius to be believed. But that's okay. They are only there as screens onto which Baxter can project his dazzling tutorials on topology, time travel via retarded waves, paradoxical consequences of Bayesian statistics, sound ethical justifications for destroying the universe, and cosmology as a branch of genetics, among other perfectly serious loopy ideas. Who cares if the screen is two dimensional, if the movie succeeds in adding dimensions to your mind (almost painlessly) just for the price of admission?
The scale of Baxter's imagination is so large that I often couldn't settle on whether what I was reading was comical or awe-inspiring. And from chapter to chapter the scale keeps expanding. Think Olaf Stapledon on speed, and you'll hit near the mark.
Happily, volume one is completely self contained. So much so that it's not possible to conceive of a "sequel." The remaining two "Manifold" books take place in alternate universes that merely happen to include the same characters. So if you share my phobia of trilogies and tetralogies ("Do I dare crack this book, knowing that if I even half like it I'll have to read the rest to see how it comes out?"), fear no more. By the time this one volume is over, it has *all* come out, in spades. You can wait a decade or two to pick up the "next" volume, if you like, without dropping any threads.
If you like hard science fiction, you owe it to yourself to sample Baxter, and this is a fine place to start.
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Final Fate of the Universe - Or is It?, July 18, 2004
For some reason, the current theories about just how our universe came to be and what its ultimate fate will be seems to have captivated many hard SF practitioners in the last few years. This book is certainly a member of that group (to the extreme!), but it also throws in backward quantum waves, quantum nuggets, Bayesian statistics, and an impending catastrophe that will literally wipe out humanity.
So there is certainly enough of the `hard stuff' to satisfy any science enthusiast. But what of the story? This, perhaps, is just as wild as the science, imagining a single individual, Reid Malenfant, trying to propel the world into true space travel, real exploitation of the resources available there, who is just rich enough, and brilliant enough, to possibly bring it off, in the face of the by now de rigor opposition by environmentalists, NASA, EPA, FBI, Congress, and all the rest of the alphabet soup. But Reid becomes sidetracked when he is led to see what he believes is a message from the far future, causing a change of target to a small asteroid with an unusual orbit locked to Earth's. The initial probe is manned by an enhanced squid, whose development and behaviors from a significant sub-plot. But discovered on the asteroid is an obvious `artifact', (clearly a crib from Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey), a glowing blue ring that apparently leads to other times and universes.
In the meantime, on Earth there has been a sudden appearance of `Blue Children', fantastically intelligent, semi-autistic, who quickly gain the abhorrence of almost all `normal' people as different, a threat to humanity as homo sapiens. Gathered together, these children apparently invent a machine to capture a quantum nugget, with perhaps dire consequences for the world.
How these separate threads get folded together into a truly gorgeous trip through the history and future of not just our universe, but many others, (a near biological spawning of universe from universe, each growing towards conditions that might spawn intelligent life), becomes complicated, and the vision itself has to carry the story, reminiscent of Olaf Stapledon in his wilder moments. Baxter almost brings this off, as the vision truly is grand, but in presenting this he seems to lose sight of the story of his characters, and the ultimate message of the book is either extremely depressing or seemingly irrelevant to people of today.
The science is real, the complications of the story worthy of something by A. E. van Vogt, but plot and science alone cannot carry the full weight of this story. His characters are introduced well, and I could easily believe in someone like Reid or his former wife and even Cornelius, but their growth (or lack of it) through the later parts of the story did not quite ring true. Neither did the portrayed world reaction to the Blue Children, the message of impending calamity, or the message from the future. A good attempt, but not fully successful.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
good, but a bit overwhelming, September 25, 2001
This is one of the better sci-fi books I've read in some time. It's only problems is that it presents a lot of information to the reader in the form of scientific theories. The author tries to present them in forms the average reader can understand, but I was still overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information coming at me. You could easily read this book with a modern physics book next to you so you could learn more about all of the different theories that are presented. I also still don't know if I believe in the Carter Catastrophe, but this is a work of fiction so anything could happen.
Other than the aforementioned problem this book was excellent. Other than the main characters name of Reid I enjoyed all the characters immensly. They behaved like real people who have the real problem of deciding what to do with the information they have discovered. I don't like the idea of the squid however and thought that was a bit strange, but like I said before this is a book of fiction and alot can happen.
The pacing is excellent and every time I thought I knew what was going to happen I was shocked by what was around the corner. This book goes into the deep idea of how humanity is going to survive in the long term, not just a few hundered years, but a few hundered millenia. It tackles the ideas of what our role in the universe is and what we as a species are capable of doing. At the end of the book after reading an ending I was totally suprised by I just sat there in amazement. This book made me think about things I had never thought about before. A really great book if you can get over the deluge of theories it throws at the reader.
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