Ark

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780451463319
• Notes: BUY WITH Self-confidence, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and repair to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Requirement: New

Description

With the discovery of another life-sustaining planet light years away, there is hope for a chosen few to leave the soon-to-be submerged Earth. Holle Groundwater is one of the candidates, having been trained for this purpose since childhood, when the ships Ark One and Ark Three were being built. But as Holle prepares to endure life aboard the Ark, she comes to realize that her attempt at escape may be more dangerous than trying to stay afloat on a drowning planet...

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Customer Reviews

A captivating, moving story no library should be without
ARK provides a fine, satisfying sequel to the flood-of-the-world novel FLOOD from 2009, this set in the year 2041 when the oceans are covering the earth. A chosen few have their sights set on fleeing the planet - and Holle's entire life has been one of training for this event. ARK is a captivating, moving story no library should be without!

2010-07-18 (Oregon, WI USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Another excellent exploration of society under duress
Baxter, as usual, out does himself in exploring the twilight of humanity. Multiple character viewpoints weave together to form a tapestry story which stands up to scientific scrutiny & demonstrates his outstanding ability to extrapolate both history & psychology over generations.

A must-read for Baxter fans & a worthy addition to 'Flood'.

2010-07-12 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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lord of the flies in outer space
I'm suprised no one compaired this book to "Lord of the Flies"...in outer space.
But all in all it is a book any lover of hard SF will love. Some reviewers here thought that the warp drive technology was far fetched. But in my opinion what is even more hard to swallow is the launch of the ARK spaceship using nuclear bombs to lift off the earth. I'm I the only one who read this part? To think that the ship itself would not be vaporized by an exploding nuclear bomb right underneath it is pretty far fetched I think. But aside from this, this is a book that is very hard to put down, in more ways than one!

2010-07-03 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Given the Technology, can Humanity Survive Humanity?
Written in a concurrent and future time-frame to Flood, Ark explores the pressures on a select group of young candidates as they train for and execute a daring mission to spread humanity beyond a flooding earth. Stephen Baxter pays homage to a couple of favorite old SF stories and incorporates to good effect Project Orion, a fascinating cold war atomic rocket propulsion proposal that thankfully never got off the ground. Conveniently, the effects of radiation on the crew were omitted, but that is in keeping with the book's primary focus on human interactions in unfamiliar circumstances. The technological innovations (while well described and interesting) are only a means to this end. For those interested in greater detail on Project Orion, there are references in the book's after-word, plus I can recommend viewing George Dyson's TED video, which includes a graphical representation of the Ark crew's launch experience, along with tables showing transit times to the outer planets.

As other reviewers have noted, this is a dark or perhaps more realistic assessment of how a highly ambitious mission to the stars would eventuate. The characters' strengths and weaknesses are developed to good effect, making this more believable, if somewhat chilling entertainment as incidents with roots in the candidates' formative years impact the Ark's mission.

I enjoyed Ark more than Flood, despite the fact that Ark has left several threads frustratingly open. While it seems to take forever before the interstellar journey commences, there is always plenty happening and the book could definitely have been longer without dragging.

2010-06-22 (Adelaide, South Australia) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Baxter is excellent with the science, should stay away from the human drama
I've long been a fan of Baxter's work, especially the earlier stuff, despite his cardboard cutout characters, because the science carried the day.

In this book, the science is strong, but Baxter has been trying for a few years to do drama well, too, and he just can't hack it. I started getting a little repulsed while reading Manifold: Origin after the fourth graphic and brutal baby murder.

You see, Baxter doesn't REALLY know how to write human drama, being a science nerd, but he's trying to be a more well rounded writer and so he shoehorns it in anyway. I applaud the attempt, but he's a one note horn in this aspect. Count up the number of tense dramatic scenes in Ark. Now count how many of them involve a baby in dire jeopardy or a baby being killed (at least graphic depictions are left out this time for the most part) or a baby crying or implied danger of physical harm to a baby. My guess would be that the ratio works out to something around 97%.

We get it, Steve. You hate babies. Man, that's OK. As long as your violent anger toward babies remains in the pages of your manuscripts and out of your real life, I say go for it. From abortions, both real and "simulated", mothers deliberately abandoning their babies, babies being thrown over fences, babies being blown up, drowned, etc etc etc in your manuscripts it's CLEAR that you've got some issues to work out, dude. We get it. Lay off the babies now. Message received. Come up with a new plot device, or better yet, a couple dozen new plot devices for conveying human tension in your work. You're a better writer than this, Steve. Calm down on the babies.

The plot is well conceived, the characters actually have some depth which is an improvement over earlier works. I'd give 2 1/2 stars if I could, but two will have to do because of the contrivances Baxter keeps throwing at us. He may as well have just included a photo of himself holding up a placard that says "You should feel tense right now. This is a tense story event." instead of constantly hanging babies out to dry.

2010-06-18 (Plainville, CT United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Moonseed

Description

It Eats Planets. And It's Here.

It starts when Venus explodes into a brilliant cloud of dust and debris, showering Earth with radiation and bizarre particles that wipe out all the crops and half the life in the oceans, and fry the ozone layer. Days later, a few specks of moon rock kicked up from the last Apollo mission fall upon a lava crag in Scotland. That's all it takes . . .

Suddenly, the ground itself begins melting into pools of dust that grow larger every day. For what has demolished Venus, and now threatens Earth itself, is part machine, part life-form: a nano-virus, dubbed Moonseed, that attacks planets.

Four scientists are all that stand between Moonseed and Earth's extinction, four brilliant minds that must race to cut off the virus and save what's left of Earth--a pulse-stopping battle for discovery that will lead them from the Earth's inner core to a daredevil Moon voyage that could save, or damn, us all.

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Stephen Baxter, the much-lauded author of Voyage and Titan, has been praised as a sci-fi writer who gets the science right. This rigor and research are clearly evident in Moonseed, a tale with high-energy physics and space-travel technology in starring roles. It's Baxter's boyish enthusiasm for science--especially space travel--that makes Moonseed so involving.

A world-class disaster epic worthy of any Saturday matinee, Moonseed opens with the spectacular, explosive death of Venus, an event requiring energy a thousand billion times the world's nuclear arsenal. As the radioactive blast from the late Venus reaches Earth, scientists scramble to attribute a cause, with massless black holes and elementary particles the size of bacteria pointing towards some sort of superstring as the smoking gun. The pace quickens when the substance that may have caused the demise of Venus is accidentally introduced to Earth. This substance, dubbed moonseed, acts as a geological lubricant: processes that normally take millions of years occur in mere months with moonseed in the picture. Once Scotland and the state of Washington get gobbled up by this rock-eating, 10th-dimensional nano-lifeform, all hell breaks loose and the search turns towards finding safe refuge for humanity on the Moon. The book's second half is a seat-of-your-pants, what-if exploration of space travel and terraforming.

An over-the-top doomsday yarn by some measures, Moonseed keeps your feet on the ground with good science, good characters, and a good story. --Paul Hughes

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Customer Reviews

Adolescent chatter
Could not get past page 85; multiple references to "age" of characters that rendered them somehow incomplete or inadequate, including one such reference to a woman who was ONLY age 30. Either this author produced this manuscript in his young 20s and didn't KNOW any better or he's a blithering idiot.

2010-06-30 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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Very good, but not the best from Baxter
Baxter is one of the best living SF writers and all his books deserve a read (at least I have not yet found one that does not).
Moonseed is very good but is not his best. Maybe I'm being overly critic because the story is "too close to home", and does not go as deep as many others in exploring other life forms and time scales in the Universe. Or maybe it's the characters and some unrealistic plot twists.
On the positive, the book explores the possibility of the Earth being attacked by a nano-device that practically melts the soil, breaking the upper crust and stimulating heavy volcanic activity. It has some interesting "scenes" on the Moon, and is overall a pleasant read. However, for those used to Baxter, beware that this is not his best. Good read!

2010-05-08 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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Tedious and disappointing
(To avoid nitpicking and restating all the weaknesses of this book, please read other two- and three-star reviews for details I agree makes this book a poor read.)

I myself bought it some years back because I was wild about the other books Baxter had written, mostly the Manifold series.

Where this lets down is not the science, because as another reviewer states, in a sci-fi, you must (even as a science buff) be prepared to give established scientific fact some leeway to let a story and a problem come into being. It lets down on

* first, being Scotland-centric. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against UK SF writers paying homage to their homelands, as Baxter himself, Peter Hamilton, Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod, and M. John Harrison have done - in fact I like some local colour, so that all SF isn't set in the Crichtonesque USA. The problem is that it leaves the rest of the world in a dark vacuum, which robs the suspense; sure, the moon-seed is dropped in Edinbourgh and the catastrophe develops from there, but come on, the rest of the Earth is affected, too! But we learn little about it.

* Second is the discontinuities in the story, or at least one major I'll describe here; Nearing the end of the book, we go from an evacuated Scotland to, boom, one of the protagonists suddently being alone on the earth some years later. There was no story to fill that huge gap. Perhaps it was meant as an epilogue, but I feel there was no preparation for it.

* Third is the unreality of the whole scenario - not that the Earth is doomed (sci-fi, remember!), but that the evacuation seems to take place largely in an air of stoic calm. Not much of the human angle. Again, it leaves you feeling that the story universe is constructed inside a gaping vacuum that begs for some fulFILLment.


Baxter has done better in his earlier works. Avoid this one.

2009-10-15 | somethingorother (Denmark, Europe) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 2

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Knows his Geology, but not his Biology or Planetology
Enjoying SF is all about suspension of disbelief. The author lost me the first time when the retired cop breaks some ribs (including a compound fracture)and keeps on truckin for HOURS. Unless the guy either can shut of pain or is Superman, this aint gonna happen.
Terraforming the Moon ? Maybe. But...there is no satisfactory answer as to WHY the Moonseed chooses this particular time to start doing its stuff when its been in the solar system for billions of years. I also found out from a planetologist friend of mine that the Earth has been bombarded by stuff from the moon for the same billions of years...Just as we have a meteorite from Mars which has been found in antarctica.
There also seems to be a time discrepancy as to how long the Earth will last once the Moonseed gets going. Henry thinks its on the short side. It turns out being decades. The story just keeps on getting more and more un-believable as it goes along. Too bad....

2007-10-09 (Iowa) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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Tedious
I hate it when I have to skip pages to enjoy a book. Page after page after page after page after page after page of needless details that don't further the plot.

Baxter got so bogged down in details about spaceflight and PREPARATION for spaceflight that he forgot he was telling a story. Hey, we're smarter than that. We get it.

2006-06-02 (Dallas, TX USA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 1

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Flood

Description

The "deeply scary"(BBC Focus) new novel from a national bestselling and critically acclaimed author.

Four hostages are rescued from a group of religious extremists in Barcelona. After five years of being held captive together, they make a vow to always watch out for one another. But they never expected this...

The world they have returned to has been transformed by water-and the water is rising. As it continues to flow from the earth's mantle, entire countries disappear. High ground becomes a precious commodity. And finally, the dreadful truth is revealed: before fifty years have passed, there will be nowhere left to run...

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Customer Reviews

An Entertaining Apocalyptic Read
The premise of Flood is simple: in 2016, oceans around the world begin to rise steadily, forcing people onto higher and higher ground as the flood progresses. The novel is set up after the rescue of four hostages after five years of captivity from Barcelona, by the rich CEO of AxysCorp. They are immediately thrown into this unfolding global catastrophe, and as such they make a pact to always look out for each other, and we see their lives play out over the next three decades.

Besides just illustrating the scale of the flood, the long time period serves to give us a better look at the characters' lives than most books ever get to. We get to see young kids grow up into adults struggling in the new world, the Barcelona hostages travel around the world, develop relationships, and finally grow old as relics of the old world. Through this, we literally get a full sense of their lives, as we get to experience roughly half of them.

While the book delivers plenty of thrills, Baxter also manages to work in a side dish of social criticism. Once the hostages return to London, they notice the prevalence of a device called the "Angel", which seems to be the future's answer to the iPhone. The Angel is a multimedia device that is the newest distraction for the tech-savvy, delivering entertainment straight to the user's brain. However, as the world floods and the situation becomes more urgent, the realities of the changing environment are obvious. While the great cities drown, their streets fill with sewage and oil, and by the end of the novel, the only sign of their existence is the indestructible plastic junk that floats above them. While I feel the Angel theme was written in well enough, at times his "greener" ideas are a little too easy to spot, even if they do fit in well with the book.

My only other criticism of the book would be the pacing. Overall, the book flows without a hitch, but Baxter has a tendency to dive into the geography of the changing world, naming laundry lists of cites, rivers and seas that have drowned. At times I felt that I needed an atlas next to me to fully visualize the changing landscape, and as the book works best as a fast-paced adventure, these passages can be taxing to read.

Overall, Flood is the literary equivalent to the summer blockbuster. It's easy to read, provides a little food for thought, and takes you along for a great ride. Flood will probably not be the best book you ever read, but it's certainly a damn good one.

2010-07-10 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Hard to put down
As is usual with Baxter's work this is very tightly written and engrossing. He builds the suspense from the start and never lets you off the roller coaster. His characters are well rounded and more intelligent than most seen in fiction. I was reading as fast as I could allowing for interuptions (like work) and finished it in about 18 hours.
I highly recommend this to anyone who likes "hard" Sci fi.

2010-07-06 (TN USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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A Compelling Read
As I write this review oil is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. The story of our species is one of an animal capable of some of the most amazing achievements and yet also capable of believing in the most idiotic illusions. This story takes a known phenomenon, the rising sea levels, and adds really only one twist, but to me, a very believable one. One reviewer wrote that the story continued to resonate with him and I am also having that experience. There are no ultra-heroic persons in this book--I found the plot detail by which we are introduced to the key characters odd but it quickly recedes into the background. Although I have read the Forge of God and Lucifer's Hammer and other similar books, I found the people and action in this one much more believable.

2010-06-18 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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It Just Goes On and On
I initially thought this book would be great, but I became steadily more disappointed. The author seems to spend a lot of effort developing the story, but minimal effort on developing deep characters that the reader can connect with. The "science" behind the book was interesting, but certainly not the characters themselves.

2010-05-15 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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I enjoyed it
Having read "Moonseed" I was familliar with Baxter's writing style. I find him very easy to read and he moves the story along quickly.

I picked this book up at the library 'cuz I thought it looked interesting. While it was not the "Best SF I've ever read!" I was strangely moved by the story. The book jumps years at a time from flooding rains to "the last rock going under the water," which covers, what? 30, 40 years?

There were moments that I found really moving, and they weren't even major points in the story. Like when it's reported that the last horse on Earth was dead. Just little moments that make a story like this hit you. Details that paint mini pictures of stories that are not central to the novel.

I'm a fan of apocalypse and post-apocalypse literature, and I gotta say that while I enjoyed the story, the outsiders view into the world drowning actually made me a bit blue.

If you're looking fo a fairly decent disaster novel, pick this up.

2010-04-15 (SF CA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Emperor: Time's Tapestry Book One

Product Details

• ISBN13: 9780441017034
• Environment: New
• Notes: BUY WITH Belief, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and assistance to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Description

A Celtic noble betrays his people and sides with the conquering Roman legions—all because of a prophecy that reveals secrets about the world that is to come, guiding those who hold it to wealth and power.

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Customer Reviews

Solid, but not equal to Baxter's best
"Time's Tapestry" is a four-part series by sci-fi author Stephen Baxter in the "alternate history" genre, beginning in the year 4 B.C. and ending in the 1940s (or their equivalent years). "Emperor" is the first book in the series, and while it trends more towards historical fiction than alternate history, it remains an interesting book.

"Emperor" begins in 4 B.C. in what is now central Britain, when a prophecy concerning the future is uttered in pure Latin - by a woman dying in childbirth who does not speak it. The novel then follows the story of this prophecy as its possessors divine its mysteries (as well as the mystery of its creator, whom they call "The Weaver") and attempt to use it to their own ends. Along the way, we see the progression of Great Britain through the characters' eyes from mere decades after Julius Caesar's conquest to the near-end of Britain's provincial status in the Roman Empire.

This is not the first time that Baxter has written a novel that took place in Roman-era Britain, and it shows. The work is rich in historical detail, which creates some excellent imagery. The characterization is more mixed in value; Baxter "jumps" different spans of time, so each story arc is effectively self-contained (although he does try to show some familial or other connection between an arc and the one preceding it). Some arcs are done very well (Severa comes to mind), while others are little more than plot conveniences to move the prophecy forward.

Much of the criticism of this novel has centered around the fact that it is, with the exception of the prophecy, virtually historical fiction. This is technically true; while it becomes clear, particularly near the end of the series, that this is alternate history, Emperor itself is almost an inverse of the typical historical fiction story. Rather than showing a past changed and moving outwards from there, it shows how the prophecy and attempts to follow it create the possibility for changing the future, whether or not that actually occurs..

Overall, it is a fairly solid work, although not one of Baxter's greatest books. I would recommend it for anyone interested in reading alternate history, as well as anyone interested in a reasonably short historical fiction novel set in the Roman-era Great Britain.

2010-01-29 | Reviewer (Salt Lake City, UT) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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Interesting historical novel, but not very alternate
After finishing this novel, I noticed that there is a timeline in the front. I compared that to actual historical timelines. Um, where's the divergence?

The premise of the novel is a strange prophecy. The characters revolve around the prophecy, but if you don't bother to do some reading up on history yourself then you won't notice where history is supposed to diverge.

It is fairly engaging, with plenty of character development and historical accuracy. It doesn't fail to entertain, but it doesn't live up to its billing, either.

2010-01-03 (Everett, WA United States) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 3

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enlightening but turgid
this would be a good read for a history class, bringing alive a milieu little known to most. Saying this is better than a history textbook is faint praise. Love the premise but I had to push through to the end, rather than be drawn effortlessly. I felt virtuous having read the whole thing, but not pleased.

2009-07-26 (Mountain View, CA) | Helpful Votes: 3 | Rating: 3

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Ancient history buffs will like this.
From 4 BC to 418 AD, Baxter follows the legacy of two families from ancient Britannia led by a prophecy that proclaims from a "God-as-babe" birth to the dneath of an emperor. The brilliant interweaving of the lives of the characters and the relvance of the prophecy. As a history buff and a fellow writer of Roman Empire historical fiction, I recommend this book. Enjoy!

2009-05-26 (Pheonix, AZ USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 4

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Not bad as historical fiction, but not what its billed to be
As a fan of alternate history novels such as "1632" and "Island in the Sea of Time," I eagerly purchased "Emperor" with expectations of something similar. Instead, I got a "historical novel" not unlike any other historical novel ever written. "Emperor" is very similar to Rosemary Sutcliff's juvenile historical novel "The Capricorn Bracelet." Instead of following a bracelet through important historic eras, it instead follows a family as they are guided through time by a prophesy that leads them to make astute business decisions and become players in the larger background of history.

If you like historical novels, and especially stories of the Roman Empire, "Emperor" is a decent read. The characters are compelling and the storytelling good, if sometimes bogged down by description. My college class in Ancient Rome was helpful in understanding the political machinations we see in the story, but I wanted more explanation of the modern equivalent of some of the location

The biggest drawback is that "Emperor" is NOT what the cover claims it to be. It is not in any way, shape or form "alternate history." Because of that label, I kept expecting something to change, for history to be altered. I waited for the assassination attempt on Claudius to be successful, or for the Britons to be victorious against the Romans. But it never happened, history never changed.

I purchased this book as alternate history, and once I realized it was not going to "change history," I gave up. Since I am not a fan of historical fiction, the story is not compelling enough to keep my attention, but it probably would be an excellent read for those who simply enjoy multi-generation family historical fiction.

2009-05-03 | Jean (Colorado) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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Evolution

Description

Stretching from the distant past into the remote future, from primordial Earth to the stars, Evolution is a soaring symphony of struggle, extinction, and survival; a dazzling epic that combines a dozen scientific disciplines and a cast of unforgettable characters to convey the grand drama of evolution in all its awesome majesty and rigorous beauty. Sixty-five million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, there lived a small mammal, a proto-primate of the species Purgatorius. From this humble beginning, Baxter traces the human lineage forward through time. The adventure that unfolds is a gripping odyssey governed by chance and competition, a perilous journey to an uncertain destination along a route beset by sudden and catastrophic upheavals. It is a route that ends, for most species, in stagnation or extinction. Why should humanity escape this fate?

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Following up his cosmic Manifold series, Stephen Baxter peers back on a more prosaic history in the worthy yet uneven Evolution. The book is nothing less than a novelization of human evolution, a mega-Michener treatment of 65 million years starring a host of smart, furry primates representing Homo sapiens's ancestry. Each stage of our ancestry is represented by a character of progressively increasing intelligence, empathy, and brain size, who must survive predation and other perils long enough to keep the natural-selection ball rolling. While Baxter carefully follows some widely accepted theories of evolution--punctuated equilibrium, for instance--he also strays from the known in postulating air whales and sentient, tool-wielding dinosaurs. And why not? There's nothing in the fossil record to contradict his musings about those things, or about the first instances of mammalian altruism and deception, which he also lets us observe. From little Purga, a shrewlike mammal scurrying under the feet of ankylosaurs, all the way through Ultimate, the last human descendant, Baxter adds drama and a strong story arc to our past and future. But he spends too much time on details of the various prehumans' lives, which can become repetitive: fight, mate, die, ad infinitum. And readers eager for a science-fictional adventure will only find satisfaction in the posthuman chapters at the end. Despite these flaws, Evolution grips the attention with an epoch-spanning tale of the random changes that rule our genetic heritage. Recommended. --Therese Littleton

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Customer Reviews

horrible
I am an avid and patient reader, an I also own most of the books Mr. Baxter wrote. By far this is the worst of them, and one of the worst books I ever touched...a disgrace.

2010-07-08 (NY, USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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A Game of Chance
Take a walk with our ancestors (the primates) as they evolve over millions of years from Purgatorius, a small rodent like creature to a mammal that looks a lot like a lemur, then a monkey, next an ape and finally into the upright walkers like homo erectus...the neanderthals and more...

this books is science fiction...it's science faction...although Baxter says not to use it as a text book...this is a brillant look at evolution and probably my favorite science fiction book of all time.

The book begins as the comet (Devil's Tail) is about to smash into earth laying waste to every dinosaur on the planet (via firestorm and nuclear winter). It puts us center stage for one of the biggest mass extinctions in the history of our planet. The only survivors are turtles, crocodiles, sharks, some birds, rodents, and a small hominid named Purga.

Move through our evolutionary chain, as Baxter tells a story 65 million years in the making...and 500 million years beyond our present...

2010-05-25 (HI) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Beyond today
Funny, although I enjoyed Stephen Baxter's ideas of our early ancestors and how they might have lived, and hypothesized their ability to make tools and reason, I thought that his projections to be more interesting. I can't look at my town's footprint now without thinking about what kind of heavy metals and poisons are soaking into the soil--only to be present and inflicting damage for eons beyond human life. I found the ending to be realistic; resembling a martian landscape which makes geologic sense in that the mountains do degrade into flatlands over time. This story sticks with you; once you read it, you can't forget it. Our human impact on Earth becomes even more relevant.

2009-08-25 | trout creek (Napa, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Highly recommended
I loved this book and author. This was the first book I read by Stephen Baxter and I very impressed at how good of a writer he is.

2009-04-26 | Yin Yang (Saint George, Utah USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Amazing book!!!
I love this book! It is fiction, of course, but well researched. So, what is this book? This book is the next best thing to a time machine. In fact, this is the book that I've always wanted to write myself. Now I don't have to! Yippee! Stephen did a far better job than I ever could anyway. I love history, and I love pre-history. "History," the written record of human events, is all well and good. We have enormous amounts of information with which to reconstruct a narrative of human life, thought, troubles, and triumphs. Prehistory, on the other hand, is much different. We have lots of information, but the farther back in time you go the more speculative any narrative will be. I want a time machine so bad!! I want to set up a blind and watch the dinosaurs go about their day. I want to watch early primates as they branch out into different species, see them exploit different niches, and face the challenges that among one group favor the hominid way of doing things and ultimately leads to modern humans. This book gave me exactly what I wanted, lacking an actual time machine. It covers a great deal of time, 65 million years and more, in 600 or so pages. You get detailed little glimpses into the lives of our various ancestors. How they lived, how they thought, the problems they faced, etc. Speculation? Yes. Still, it's well researched and you get an honest sense of "being there." These encounters are brief due to the amount of time covered in one book. It's very well done though. There are several periods that I would love to see expanded into a stand alone novel. (Stephen, are you listening?) I am savoring this book. I am almost finished, and really look forward to seeing what the far future holds for humanity(this is fiction, remember) but I feel a real sense of dread as I near those last pages. I don't want it to end! I love books like this, and I hate books like this! Why must they end? Buy this book!! You will enjoy it!

2009-04-17 (USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 5

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Manifold: Time

Description

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. As the world's governments turn inward, one man dares to envision 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. Now Malenfant gambles the very existence of time on a single desperate throw of the dice. Battling national sabotage and international outcry, as apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, he builds a spacecraft and launches it into deep space. The odds are a trillion to one against him. Or are they?

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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

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Customer Reviews

Profound Ideas
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.

2010-03-17 | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 4

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wasted potential
The beginning of the book was quite engrossing, but the plot kept wandering all over the place. When the story suddenly, and unexpectedly, started talking about some super-intelligent squid, I quit. Any interest I had in continuing the book was gone.

2010-01-30 | bookorama (Long Beach, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 0 | Rating: 1

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A Physics Fairy Tale - Undisciplined Writing - Cheesy
The characters were weak, but so was the story line. Too many times I had to suspend my understanding of physics to let the author plod to the next impossible description. For example, the author seems to think that reflected light travels at infinite velocity (or very much faster than c) whereas the light coming directly at you from the event is traveling at c. (Characters are watching an expanding sphere of light from an explosion, waiting for it to hit them.) The book has many such flaws. And the characters are equally flawed and thinly portrayed. I can't recommend this book to anyone expecting hard SF, unless you want to groan a lot.

2010-01-28 (Lincoln, NE USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 1

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I Got Bogged Down...
I am a fan of Stephen Baxter's. Vacuum Diagrams and The Time Ships were two of my favorite sci-fi books in the last ten years (at least among the Sci Fi I have read.) And I was looking forward to diving into a meaty trilogy of his that we could me reading for awhile. However whereas those two novel's took some fascinating contemporary science and built interesting conflicts and narratives on top of them, this book drowns beneath them.

Too often the action gets bogged down in a scene where one scientist or mathematician is standing in a room with one of the protagonists (who were neither) explaining some scientific principle or another which Baxter feels in imperative to the story. And just as the protagonists through one cliche or another express their confusion ("In English" - "X...tried to act like they understood." - "Malenfant tried to contain his frustrating confusion.") over and over and over again, so too was I squinting at the page and struggling to distill the important principles. Invariably the scientist or mathematician would sigh in patronizing frustration at the protagonist/me and simplify things...which they could have just done to begin with.

This happens over and over again to the point where I just got bored and ended up getting bogged down in this one for quite awhile. It's a pity because this past weekend I finally made a concerted effort to finish it and, where the first 250 pages were like a pushup drill, the last 150 were a lot of fun and I flew through them. In typical Baxter style, the story was elevated from interesting straightforward premises to questions about the very nature of the universe and what could be our place in it's present, beginning, and ultimate end. Even in the midst of the climax there was STILL that convention of the smart characters stopping to explain what was happening to the dullards in the story, but at that point the action had reached a level that I didn't care.

Even though I found this one excruciating at points I'm surprisingly still interested in the sequels, if only because I have no idea how this one could carry on. If you can soldier through the first half this one gets a hesitant recommendation.

2009-12-28 (Belmont, CA USA) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 3

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confuses scale with depth
much less than compelling characters. the truths described in the book make little sense and have other easier explanations. in short. big ideas but trite.

2009-12-26 (Washington, DC) | Helpful Votes: 1 | Rating: 2

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