I just recently read Stephen Baxter's first two Manifold books (Manifold: Time and Manifold:Space). I'm wondering if anyone here read them and what they thought of them.
For me, overall I was rather disappointed - enough so that I probably won't bother with Manifold: Origin. Fortunately, I can do that without missing "how it ends", because these books seem to be alternate universe stories where some of the characters stay the same, but (very) different & unrelated things happen. The book cover descriptions don't make that clear at all. I found the science and many of the ideas pretty compelling at times, particularly in the first book (Manifold: Time), making it hard to put down at points. But the first ending fell flat for me, and by the middle of the second book I was starting to get annoyed (and its ending also fell flat, IMHO). A few other comments: Potential spoilers warning! Potential spoilers warning! Potential spoilers warning! Potential spoilers warning! - The first book starts in 2010, but inexplicably features technology and governmental changes (ie: smart cars/highways, the sea floor stuff, uplifted squid, California with its borders (the inter-state ones!) closed to non-whites) that seem quite out of place for such a near future setting. (They book is copyright 2000, but even if he wrote it in, say 1996, a lot of this stuff seems more 2050-ish (at best) than 2010-ish.) Why set a hard-SF book in such a near future if you're going to posit things that belong much further out. - The whole uplifted squid descending for a single parent colonizing the asteroid and then the Jupiter ones with billions of population bugged the heck out of me in too many ways to bother going into. Feh. - The endless NASA-bashing started to bug me - I wonder if the NASA guy he thanks in Manifold:Time knew he was going to do that (and later go grief for it from his coworkers) or if he was disgruntled himself and that's where Baxter got it from. Not that I think NASA is perfect, but Baxter makes it seem like hugely ambitious, but near flawless space missions can be slapped together in months from spare parts. Baxter's books were written pre-Columbia but even so the world's space mission failure rate is high enough to put a lie to that. - The biggest thing that bothered me, though, was Baxter's totally apathetic and just plain pathetic depiction of humanity's reaction to the events in space: Alien artifact on a near-earth asteroid? "Yawn." Aliens colonizing/exploiting the asteroid belt? "Ho-hum." Aliens on earth performing mysterious genetic experiments? "Who cares." WTF? In the first book some of this apathy is (weakly) explained by the (improbable) Carter-catastrophe hysteria and the inexplicably precise 200 year apocalypse forecast. In the second book, though, there's not even that - it's just that no one except the few main characters cares. - Bryon _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
