Manifold: Time

Rating:
Summary: Not as bad as Titan
Review: Stephen Baxter is an extremely frustrating author. He has good "sense of wonder" ideas with erratic execution. Manifold: Time continues this tradition. Other reviews on Amazon have described the story, so I will just look at the other aspect of the book: the execution.

I won't mention character names,either, since they're all the same, male or female, young or old. They exist solely to move the story along. There's no involvement with them since there is nothing to be involved with. This is Baxter's chief failing in my opinion, and when he learns to flesh out his characters his books will finally get the emotional framework they deserve.

I suspect my enjoyment of books like Manifold: Time was ruined when I learned critial reading skills in college. Certainly, much of the Science Fiction I enjoyed as a high schooler did not hold up to second readings. The concepts were still there but I now realized that the delivery was faulty. To that extent, knowledge removed some non-critial joy from my life.

And that's why I have such a problem with Baxter's novels. Perhaps I'm just being too critical, but when I pay hardcover prices I expect to receive hardcover enjoyment. Manifold: Time is more a paperback novel, to be read on a long trip and then discarded with no regret.

Having said that, if you hate NASA, like the idea of multiple universes, and wonder whether humans are the first intelligent life to hit this cosmos, then you'll like the book. Baxter is very good in describing the physical universe, and at times the "sense of wonder" I enjoy bursts through. I think most readers will like some aspect of he book, enough at least to plow through to the ending. And many people don't care about characterization - they're more interested in the author's speculations on the fringes of scientific thought.

So don't take this review as totally negative but be prepared for what you'll find within the covers. And be careful. Don't cut yourself on the paper-thin characters.

Rating:
Summary: An Expansive novel
Review: When I first picked up Manifold: Time I was unimpressed and put it down after 15 pages. Weeks later when I started reading it again out of boredom, I couldn't put it down. This book has some of the first new ideas I've come across in a while. Baxter isn't the GREATEST writer of all time, but he is the perfect man for this story. In a way, I see Manifold Time as scientific theology. It gives all life purpose, no matter how insignificant it may seem.
That all said, this book probably isn't for you if you hate science and want more of a space opera.

Rating:
Summary: Time you will want back
Review: The concept of the book had great promise; I am always facinated by books involving the manipulation of time. I liked the scientific aspects and some of the characters, but the book simply does not live up to the promise. I am sure that the author expected some oohs and aahs at the scope of this book, but I ended up simply feeling indifferent. If you buy this book you will likely want your money back. If you read it you will want the time back, but time is more easily manipulated in fiction, so don't waste your time in the first place. I would actually rate it zero stars, if that were allowed.

Rating:
Summary: Better Than Poking Yourself in the Eye
Review: I've read a lot of heavy stuff over the last year. The Gap series, LOTR, and Atlas Shrugged. They weren't all deep, per se, but the were really intense emotionally. I think that contrast helped me to enjoy Manifold Time, by Stephen Baxter.

It's a light book. The characters are animated enough. The plot is engaging and carries the grandest scope I've read yet (yes, even bigger than Battlefield Earth.) Overall, it left me with a, "yep, that was a pretty good book" feeling. However, it did not pass the, "will I read the sequel" test.

Baxter is an engineer, and no offense, he writes like one (being an engineer, I can say that.) Clear and to the point, his prose draws out an evironment with the delicate love of a draftsman. Actually, most of the draftsmen I've met were very artistic indeed; strike that remark from the record.

But dangit, he litters the book with cosmological concepts, and I'm just a sucker for that. Obviously a Clarke fan with no less than two blatant references to the master's works, he builds a vast story within the framework of our current body of science. Not only taking us on a pleasant ride, but teaching us a few things along the way.

So the bottom line is, read it, but don't expect it to keep you up all weekend.

On a side-note, my New Year's resolution is to write Amazon reviews for all of the books I buy from Amazon this year. Next up, Lila - An Inquiry into Morals. This is Pirsig's follow up to Zen and the Art of Mortocycle Maintenance. Yeah I know, right back into the deep stuff.

Rating:
Summary: Mind candy you can get your teeth into
Review: (***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.

Rating:
Summary: On second thought, hold the calamari--I'll have the salad
Review: As a science lesson "Manifold Time" works to perfection. Unfortunately it's supposed to be a fiction book. The science, anyhow, is certainly fascinating. Radio waves beamed back to the past; "quark nuggets"; "vacuum decay"; multiple evolving universes--all real, according to the author's afterword, and all quite challenging.

And there's this loopy probability puzzle known as the Carter Catastrophe here. It, too, is real, says Mr. Baxter. But then, so is Zeno's Paradox. I wouldn't get worked up about Carter, although the characters in the book certainly do.

That's because the author wants them to get worked up. Mr. Baxter, like Woody Allen in one of his films, is apparently in a funk because the universe is expanding and will eventually wither away by heat death. So why bother? Especially since, well, Mr. Baxter, despite all the fascinating theories about evolving universes, seems to believe we're pretty much alone here--against all odds.

And because a few billion more years of evolution, alone, don't quite do it for our Mr. Baxter, he's concocted a truly hashed up plot, filled with stock characters from a Heinlein parody. (His Reid Malenfant is just a pale copy of an RAH "grand old man"; his colleage, Cornelius, keeps bringing what plot there is to a screeching halt in order to deliver his science lessons. You may actually welcome those intrusions.) The simple folk go absolutely bananas worrying about this catastrophe while Malenfant, who at one point discovers he _is_ the center of things and hurls an invective at Copernicus, manages to take a grand tour of the manifold of universes--it ends up somehow in a virtual hotel room (don't ask!).

And then there are the "blue children"--annoying, brilliant but autistic, mini-Howard Roarks, whose grand scheme is to blow everything up in order to make the evolution of universes more efficient and woe to anyone and anything that impedes them from their appointed rounds. The two characters sympathetic to the children are a Congresswoman and Malanfant's ex-wife. Everybody else wants to delete them with extreme prejudice to prevent them from creating their new order, and after a while some readers may well feel the same way.

Others, however, may find this creation of a new order fascinating and necessary. Still others--those of us content simply to have life-as-we-know it hang on here for a few billion more years or so--may find that Mr. Baxter's scenario is, well, fascinatingly fascist.

Oh, lest I forget: also appearing here are intelligent space-faring squids. Feisty critters they are too. I rather liked 'em whenever they turned up. They're the meek, who inherit the earth, but by then it isn't worth very much.

Rating:
Summary: Hey Steve! Don't stop now!
Review: I have read this trilogy and this is my favorite, of the 3 books. Yes, it can be a little bit of a downer, but, what the heck, life can be that way too. Characters do disappear for periods of time. Don't worry, they will be back. That's not a problem, for me, either.
This is a very good book if you like "hard" science fiction and a well written story that does not go where you might expect.
If he writes a 4th, count me in.

Rating:
Summary: Stands out from a sea of mediocrity
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Nice Job
Review: The world has turned stagnant. Big projects are not put into motion unless a profit can be proven to be made. A maverick, Reid Malefont wants to fly to an asteroid to mine it for its wealth using genetically enhanced squid. It is this background that Manifold: Time is written in the near future. As he draws plans for his project, a religious fanatic convinces Reid that there is an end of the world scenario likely to occur and the only way to prevent the catastrophe is to build a radio reciever to listen to signals from the future, which he does. The squid is rocketed to the asteroid and on the asteroid a gateway is found to other time/demension.

This is a well written book with a few flaws. The character development is done on mostof the characters just to move the story along which is fine except the reader will not care one way or the other for most of them. It is also the first story in a trilogy. So the ending is not the best because it must open into the second book. The basic premiss of the book is very depressing. The end of the world for humanity, but there is a way out. Baxter bounces from many of the characters including the squid to move his story along. My complaint is that as long as he stayed with Malefont, the story progressed nicely. But once he leaves Malefont, the characters are a little flat. Malefont is a perfect example of the type "A" driven individual with a goal in mind and the world be damned. He can be compared to a modern day Ahab. Every bit as destructive and driven as the 19th century version. Baxter also does a nice job with the squid and does not spend enough time on them which is a shame. This book is a good read and enjoyable.

Rating:
Summary: Good squid!
Review: I liked the squid. She was the best character in the book. The rest of it was more or less ok - definitely not something I would keep. Check it out of the library and save yourself the money. A good airplane book.