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Manifold: Time Hardcover – January 4, 2000

by Stephen Baxter (Author)

133 customer reviews

Book 1 of 4 in the Manifold Series

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Hailed by Arthur C. Clarke as "a major new talent," Stephen Baxter is one of the most gifted writers to appear in the last decade. His stunning novels combine state-of-the-art scientific speculation with nonstop adventure on a cosmic scale, continuing the grand tradition of science fiction pioneered by such giants as Isaac Asimov and Robert E. Heinlein.

Now the multi-award-winning author gives us his most ambitious and accomplished novel yet. Audaciously conceived, brilliantly executed, it is nothing less than a masterpiece--an unforgettable race through and against time itself, with the fate of the universe and all mankind hanging in the balance.

The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. But as the world's governments turn inward, one man dares to gamble on a bolder, brighter future. That man--Reid Malenfant--has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the exploration and colonization of space.

Battling national sabotage and international outcry, Malenfant's bootstrap company builds a spacecraft, plots its course, and trains the genetically enhanced Sheena 5 for her one-way journey. As apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, Malenfant launches the rocket. But Sheena has plans of her own. And even as she sets them in motion, the situation on Earth grows more desperate and violent.

Now Malenfant--together with a brilliant but disturbed mathematician, a child prodigy, and his ex-wife--must gamble the very existence of time and space on a single desperate throw of the dice. The odds are a trillion to one against him . . .

Or are they?

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Leave it to the consistently clever Stephen Baxter to pull the old bait and switch. A story that begins as a hoary asteroid-mining tale, set in 2010 against the by-now familiar spiel of fulfilling humanity's pan-galactic Manifest Destiny, instead takes a bold, delightful ascent into a trajectory far more ambitious. To ensure its survival, humankind need not merely master the galaxy but also the flow of time itself.

Manifold: Time's would-be asteroid-miner-in-chief is bootstrap space entrepreneur Reid Malenfant, a media-savvy firebrand who's showed those crotchety NASA folks what's what with his ready-to-fly Big Dumb Booster, piloted by a genetically enhanced super-squid. But Malenfant's near-term plans to exploit the asteroids get diverted when he crosses paths with creepy mathematician and eschatologist Cornelius Taine. Applying Bayes's theorem and a series of other statistical do-si-dos, Taine convinces Malenfant that an inescapable extinction event--the "Carter catastrophe"--is nigh, and that even working to colonize the galaxy might not be enough to save humanity. The answer: build a Feynman "radio" to listen to the future and, by detecting coded quantum waves traveling back through time, divine the fate of human "downstreamers" and find the key to their survival. Space flight, time travel, and even squid negotiations ensue, while Earth is gripped in Last Days madness.

Once again, the award-spangled Baxter gives us sci-fi at its beard-stroking best, with an imaginative, audacious plot line that's firmly grounded in good science, reminiscent of Baxter's own excellent Vacuum Diagrams. --Paul Hughes

From Publishers Weekly

Baxter is well known for both realistic near-future, alternate-history novels (Voyage) and the wildest sort of hard-science speculation (Flux; Timelike Infinity). In this first volume in his Manifold trilogy, he combines both types of story, beginning with what appears to be the straightforward tale of Reid Malenfant, a millionaire industrialist who tries to circumvent a near-moribund NASA and start his own on-the-cheap space program. Things soon take a strange turn, however, when Malenfant receives evidence both that humanity will be wiped out within the next 200 years and that proof of this claim can be found on a near-Earth asteroid named Cruithne. Throw in a race of mutant, starfaring squid; the sudden appearance on Earth of children with superhuman intelligence and a mysterious connection to the artifact Malenfant finds on Cruithne; a Cook's tour of literally hundreds of alternate universes; and a spectacularly unsuccessful romance with at least two endings, and you've got a novel that's as overgrown as it is misshapen. Baxter is the equal of Gregory Benford or Greg Bear when it comes to describing spectacular astronomical phenomena and truly weird science, and he shares with Arthur C. Clarke and Olaf Stapledon the ability to portray enormous vistas of time and space to great effect, but his characters can be clumsily drawn and his plots unwieldy. The first half of this novel could easily have been cut by 50 pages or so with little loss. Still, faults aside, there's plenty here to spark the veteran SF reader's sense of wonder. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product details

Series: Manifold (Book 1)
Hardcover: 448 pages
Publisher: Del Rey; 1st edition (January 4, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345430751
ISBN-13: 978-0345430755
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.2 x 7.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds
Average Customer Review: 133 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,498,397 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2470 in Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Time Travel
- #20057 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Action & Adventure > Science Fiction

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Alejandro Contreras

Interesting but complex

October 27, 2007

Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase

Based on the other reviews, it seems Manifold:Time is a controversial book. Some people loved it, some hated it, and some were in doubt.
I'll share with you my perspective:
- Mr Baxter's book is full of science. Lots of it. You will find interesting and complex concepts about the origin and destiny of the universe (or "universes", I shall say), the composition of matter, time traveling, and so forth.
- The characters are not deep. They might not be as "light" as in, by example, Asimov's works, but they are not fully developed.
- The book accelerates. Its beginning is slow but it then accelerates. Probably, you won't want to put it down.
- It seems to me that, when in doubt, Mr Baxter chose to sacrifice storyline and characters to put more emphasis on the scientific element. It's hard to balance all elements perfectly and I think he chose to put more weight on the science
- Mr Baxter share with Arthur C. Clarke an uncanny ability to portray beautiful cosmic events. This ability of his has not been leveraged to the maximum in Manifold:Time. I am not saying he does not do a good job in that regard. I only mean that this is not the key strength of the book

If you have already read other Baxter books, I don't think you'll have trouble with it. I am pretty sure you will like it. Just be aware of its emphasis on science.

On the other hand, if you have not read sci-fi before, I would not recommend you this book. Perhaps you should start with something lighter.

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Kindle Customer

Exciting and Has more than a space story

August 25, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Black holes, elastic time, big bang and big crunch. Intelligent squid pilots a space ship and has it's own story. Humans and evolution. A little bit of love. Big ideas the author understands so much he can build a story around them and all their possibilities.

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jane arc

Stands out from a sea of mediocrity

July 1, 2003

Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase

Let's face it. There's a lot of crummy science fiction out there. A lot of fanciful fluff without a lot of meaning or purpose to it.
Stephen Baxter treads a thin line between fluff and hard science fiction. This isn't because he hasn't read up on what he's talking about, but rather because his science fiction is just *so hard* that it seems at some points implausible. The science of it didn't really impress me, I read a lot of scientific text. The fact that he wrapped all those concepts up into one book, and then leapt off the cliff with them impressed me.
He has quite an imagination, and wields it impressively. The one thing you might not like about this book is his somewhat peculiar plot trajectory. He sort of starts off slow (the aforementioned "bait and switch"), and then more or less gives the book away right about in the middle, and then it lulls down to this seeming end in futility. At that point it's almost like he starts a new book and begins talking about new ideas, to end in a somewhat ... awkward ending.
This isn't to say that the book leaves you feeling cheated or anything. What I got most out of this book was a deep appreciation for how much work he put in to it. It really was a fulfilling book.
Highly recommended.

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L. A. Veronie II

Heeeey Abbott...which universe?

January 26, 2015

Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase

What a mind altering, time bending romp this was! There is no room for the limitations of the mind whilst considering the infinite possibilities...the ending was especially killer. With that in mind though, I sincerely wish Mr. Baxter will enlarge his characters mode of diction a smidge more in the next book. Malenfant "growls" entirely TOO much!!

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Patrick Shepherd

The Final Fate of the Universe - Or is It?

July 18, 2004

Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase

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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Satisfied Hat purchaser

Five Stars

September 25, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Enhanced Caribbean reef squid make up for some of this book's slower points.

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Joel B

Profound Ideas

March 17, 2010

Format: Mass Market PaperbackVerified Purchase

Baxter's 'Manifold Time' focuses on some truly profound ideas and mind-boggling time scales. Very deep.

Yes, the dialogue, plot, and characters are at times a bit thin. Overall the plot and writerly craft pick up during the second half. But the point of 'Manifold Time' is the science and the ideas, and sublime ideas they are. If you are just looking for a dumb, cheap thriller, this is not for you. But anyone who appreciates Carl Sagan or Michio Kaku and the accompanying deep thoughts of astrophysics and the universe should appreciate this book.

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