Tied in to Baxter's masterful Manifold trilogy, these thematically linked stories are drawn from the vast graph of possibilities across which the lives of hero Reid Malenfant have been scattered. It is the year 2025. Reid Malenfant is the commander of a NASA earth-orbiting science platform. The platform is intended to probe the planets of the nearest star system by bouncing laser pulses off them. But no echoes are returned! and Malenfant's reality begins to crumble around him. Huddling with his family, awaiting the end -- or an unknown new beginning -- Malenfant tells stories of other possibilities, other realities. The linked stories encompass the myriad possibilities that might govern our relationship with the universe: are we truly alone, or will we eventually meet other lifeforms? Perhaps intelligent species decide to turn their back on the stars, or maybe expansionist species are destined to fail. The final possibility -- that the Universe as we know it is in fact an elaborate illusion designed to protect us from the fearful reality -- is brilliantly explored in the tour de force novella that ends the volume.
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Editorial Reviews
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'Baxter is taking basic sf ideas and rebuilding them based on current science, technology and politics -- a tried and true method sor sf writers but no less effective for that. Baxter apparently has the ambition and the energy to reinvigorate hard sf all by himself' Locus on Space 'Like all good sf, Space provokes questions. What kind of species are we?! the other reason Space works well is that Baxter is a good writer! his format and style are assured and keep you happily suspended and engrossed. Right up to the satisfyingly vertiginous climax! Malenfant is one of sf's more memorable characters' SFX 'Pacy, visionary, extravagantly imagined, Time places Baxter firmly in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov. How reassuring to know that while so many authors are lying in the gutter of the information superhighway, someone at least is still looking at the stars' The Times 'Time is a big ambitious book! science fiction at its best'
About the Author
Stephen Baxter applied to become an astronaut in 1991. He didn't make it, but achieved the next best thing by becoming a science fiction writer, and his novels and short stories have been published and have won awards around the world. His science background is in maths and engineering. He is married and lives in Buckinghamshire.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Manifold Series #4: Phase Space (UK only),
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This review is from: Phase Space (Paperback)
I personally feel this is the best of Baxter's Manifold series. The book is comprised of 23 separate vignettes or short stories all loosely tied together around the Manifold series themes and the famed Fermi Paradox (i.e.: if space really is that big, odds are we are not alone, merely really far apart...or some other explanation). The short story format truncates Baxter's normally oblique yet action packed writing style into 23 separate punches to the hard sci-fi face. It's a bit disorientating to read more than one story per sitting but still doable on a two-hour flight. The UK only release is noticeable in the some spellings. It's definitely worth your time.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing and wide-ranging - a fine collection of stories,
This review is from: Phase Space (Paperback)
"Phase Space" by Stephen Baxter is a collection of 25 loosely-related short stories linked to - and expanding on themes introduced in - his Manifold novel trilogy of "Time", "Space" and "Origin". At its heart is the question posed by the physicist Enrico Fermi: given that the universe is billions of years old, if life exists out in the cosmos, why don't we see the evidence of it all about us? These stories represent the author's attempts to try to make sense of this paradox.
Pieces such as 'Open Loops', 'Sun-Cloud', 'The We Who Sing' and 'The Gravity Mine' explore the idea that other forms of intelligent life might exist or once have existed out in the cosmos. Baxter takes various scenarios, from the distant past - a mere few hundred thousand years post-Big Bang - to the distant future - trillions of years from now, when the universe is cold and dark - and supposes various alien civilisations, each of them coming to terms with their world and each of them with their own versions of the Fermi Paradox. One of Baxter's favourite themes is space exploration and it is no accident that many of the stories take astronauts as their main characters: including 'Poyekhali 3201', an imagining of Yuri Gagarin's experience as the first man in space. One of the best stories in the collection is 'War Birds', in which the Cold War has escalated into space and the Shuttle fleet has fallen under the control of USAF, becoming an agent of destruction for a militaristic US government intent on demonstrating its capabilities to the rest of the world. As interesting as such alternate histories are, however, they are unrelated to the main theme of the collection. Indeed the most intriguing stories are those which explore the idea that humanity exists either in some kind of simulation - as in 'Tracks' - or within a bubble or quarantine zone - 'Barrier' - in both cases set up by a higher intelligence, seemingly to foster or protect our species from true reality, but for what purpose is not clear. The collection's main piece, 'Touching Centauri', is perhaps the most exciting of all, as it examines what might happen when we begin to stretch that simulation to its limits. Baxter's imagination surpasses that of most other writers of modern science fiction. But while the ideas are wide-ranging, the writing itself can occasionally feel awkward or disjointed. Often one feels that the themes have been compressed to fit the medium of the short story, when in fact there are enough ideas to sustain several longer pieces, perhaps of novella- or even novel-length. A more minor disappointment is that more of the stories do not feature the main characters from the Manifold arc; indeed Reid Malenfant appears in only one of the pieces. That said, however, "Phase Space" is an exciting collection of work with tremendous vision, and an excellent companion to the Manifold trilogy.
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