Manifold: Time

Rating:
Summary: The ideas are amazing...
Review: This is without a doubt one of the best science fiction novels I've read in a long time. The ideas that Baxter brings up and the imagination that he uses is incredible. This book starts to get good at page 50. By 150, you are completely hooked. I'm not kidding when I say it continues to get good right up until 400, where it gets even better. Great book. I'm definitely going to look for more work by Baxter.

Rating:
Summary: Forget the Fiction, Enjoy the Science
Review: Baxter wrote some very good descriptions of science knows or theorizes now in 2001. The major irritation is that he had to put a plot and make it fictionalized. As the Afterword shows, the major concepts described are real and have been talked about in the major scientific journels. The asteroid is real and the "Carter Catastrophe" is at least theoretically possible (or at least, not ruled out completely), and squid are really quite intelligent for invertibrates. In the speeches he gives his characters, Baxter presents the most mind-numbing concepts in a clear manner.

That said, it's the plot. The characters do things that make no logical sense. A billionaire, Reid Malenfant, decides to cobble together a space ship in a manner of months and genetically craft squid to do the driving. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Scrooge MacDuck couldn't and wouldn't even attempt something as off-the-wall as that and do it in a few months. A strange mathemetician pops up and claims the "intelligences" from the far future are attempting to communicate with us Earthlings. Go to this particular asteroid and, voila, our billionaire reconfigures this extremely expensive venture to a whole new target. Again, in a in a short amount of time.

Baxter, having read Clarke's superior Childhood's End, has these genius kids cropping up all over the place saying things that a Cal Tech Physicist would have trouble understanding. Are these kids good, bad, or Profoundly Evil. Baxter never quite explains that. There certainly isn't much in the way of to find out. And the squid, suddenly evolved to super-intellectual status, they could max out the SAT too. Are they good, bad, or Profoundly Evil, too? You get the feeling when a sizable portion of them cobble together super-spaceships out of an asteroid decide to decamp out near Jupiter that maybe we are better off without them.

Malenfant seems to have a profound God-complex. He gets profoundly depressed when on a jaunt through the Complete History of the Universe finds out that, no matter what, in ten to the one-to-the-one-hundred-and-sixteen years, Humanity or whatever intelligence evolves, will die out. He thus decides to help or at least condone the euthanization of the entire cosmos which the superkids, now living on the moon, are going to do. Jean Luc Picard would have at least waxed eloquent in defense of Humanity. I found the overall storyline to be profoundly depressing. Nevertheless, the Science was right on target.

Rating:
Summary: Well Grounded but Pessimistic ...
Review: This was my first exposure to Stephen Baxter. I was impressed by the good reviews this book recieved from some of my favorite authors such as David Brin, and Arthur C. Clarke. Also, I have always had a weakness for a time travel story. I decided to pick it up.

Personally, I found the beginning to be a little slow. It took me a little time to really start enjoying the read, maybe fifty pages or so. Nothing major happened in that time and there was no real reason for me to continue turning pages other than a dogged belief that the story would improve.

My faith was justified (although I should qualify that statement). The pace rapidly increased and exciting events were interspersed with thought provoking ideas by the end of the first part of the book. However, readers who prefer light fare should beware! This book is dense with ideas. It is a thick and hearty stew so don't come looking for green tea.

I have nearly completed a degree in physics so I did understand and/or recognize many of the ideas that Baxter put forth in this novel. He uses these concepts to good effect and spins an intriguing yarn. On the other hand, he gives his microbiologist far too much general knowledge. I can accept the idea of squid "Uplifting" to borrow a term from Brin, but the microbiologist should not be expected to understand relatavistic physics and mechanical engineering!

Also, the mathematician is stereotypical and annoying, but I digress.

Baxter fills the book with small hints of the ultimate outcome of this book but I only recognized them after the fact. While I was appalled at the treatment of the Blue children, I could not truly say that it was completely unrealistic and I found that to be the most disturbing legacy of this book....

Rating:
Summary: A sadly lacking premise to the story
Review: I have enjoyed many of Stephen Baxter's books in the past. This one, however, just does not measure up. Statistically showing the world must soon end: Come on, is that the best that he could come up with to get the the book started?. Nevertheless, I read on hoping that I could just suspend disbelief. I was mostly successful, but then got bogged down with characters explaining science to me every 2 pages. Maybe if you know no physics that part is interesting. I found it useless, and typically skipped whole paragraphs that were science tutorial monologs.

I'm about to start Manifold: Space. Hopefully it will be better.

Rating:
Summary: Manifold Failure
Review: Isaac Asimov once said a good SF writer will ask his reader to suspend disbelief only once. Here, Stephen Baxter asks us to do it, oh, 472 times (once per page). There is nothing remotely plausible about anything that happens in this book. It reminds me of a typical "postmodern" Hollywood movie-- stitched together from parts of other books or movies, never bothering to pretend that anything here could actually take place. Sections of "Children of the Damned" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" are lifted whole, as are long passages of Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time." OK, so it's intended to be a "romp" of sorts through the latest loopy theories about space-time and multiple universes. At least he could have made it a fun, engaging romp, instead of a grueling, depressing one.

"Manifold: Time" ranks as a major disappointment for this reader, who after devouring "Voyage" and "Titan" was well on his way to becoming a Baxter fan. But here, all of the negative habits that were merely annoying in his earlier efforts completely take over the work. As noted by other reviewers, there are no true "characters" here, only a series of pompous names attached to long blasts of expository "dialogue." Everyone-- even six-year-old kids-- talks like a nuclear physicist. Baxter's deep pessimism about the human race, his contempt for all forms of religion (but especially Christianity), and his apparent fascination with doomsday theories take center stage here, while the gritty, nuts-and-bolts realism and sense of adventure that made "Voyage" and parts of "Titan" so enjoyable are completely lacking. A Brit, he displays a puzzling lack of knowledge about how the U.S. government works, investing a mere congresswoman with all kinds of executive decision-making powers. But the worst sin is to make the notion that multiple universes might exist somehow boring! For a real "romp" through quantum physics and space-time, read Michael Crichton's "Timeline." It may be a piece of fluff, but at least you won't kick yourself for having wasted your time reading it, as I did with "Manifold: Time."

Rating:
Summary: DOOMSDAY FEAST
Review: I must give Baxter four stars for even attempting a doomsday script. End-of-the-universe stories present little personal edification or box office value. However, this is as much a cosmology textbook as it is a novel. Rewarding as it may be to plow through, it would be best to read the ten books and articles mentioned in the Afterword before settling down to read the story. Unmotivated, abstruse theories on cosmology and physics spout out from several characters none of who survive to the ending. Real obstacles to enjoying the story. It is one matter to frame a story with hard science and theory but Baxter tries to use this story to explore too many speculative (he says real) topics such as black holes, false vacuums, probabilistic doomsday, Feynman radio waves from the future, quark nuggets, proton decay and on and on and on. All this is at the expense of developing characters and keeping the action moving.

To go downstream in time was to travel into the future. The gimmick used to save the principle character Reid from his doomsday was to fling his dead body through the "blue portal"--"downstream," where he is reconstructed. Just another Alice's Through the Looking Glass device. (Yes, he died, but his spectral self is downstream or up above watching.) As to narration, too frequent shiftings from the first person to the third person for no apparent reason are problematic. For example, the narrator reveals Emma's innermost thoughts but when the crying "Blue Kids" embrace her we read: "And maybe she{Emma} was weeping too; it was hard to tell." The reader often wonders who is telling this story -- I still don't know.

As long as his characters stayed within one time frame I could identify and care about them, but when they were flung into the future or brought back from the dead they became like disembodied mouths spouting gobbledygook. When a character died this didn't mean finality because she might be raised from the dead ten pages later. Parts of the story became unattached, unframed and incomprehensible even to the fictive characters involved. I got the idea there was enough material printed here for a trilogy. What I found myself reading was the Author's notebook for a novel. All this is not to say that a physics professor wouldn't find the story a much easier and enjoyable read than I did.

Rating:
Summary: My God! It's full of... universes!
Review: People have criticised Baxter for his paper-thin characterisations. In my opinon, the fast-paced nature of Manifold: Time doesn't lend itself to great character development. You really don't have time to invest feelings in Reid Malenfant, Emma Stoney and the Blue Children, except on a superficial level. This is a story about mind-boggling science, the wonder of the Universe and just what human existence means.

Having just finished the book, I'm still in that post-brain-melt stage; the science is staggering. You can't fault Baxter for throwing in as many theories as he does, and every one of them is put to wonderful use. As a suggestion, have a connection to the internet open so you can research these theories as they crop up in the book. Reading about Cruithne and Caribbean Sea Squid added a wonderful sense of learning to the novel.

If you're looking for a thought-provoking, hard science novel that never lets up until the last page, I thoroughly recommend Manifold: Time.

You'll love the one-line nod to Arthur C. Clarke's "2001".

Rating:
Summary: One-of-a-kind
Review: I really liked it. The book was filled with new things for me. I learned a lot about not only time, but about how the galaxy was formed and about the randomness (or lack of) of the whole thing.

It's also right off the headlines; just check the news about NASA landing on Eros! Could Eros be the beginning of commercial exploration of space? Baxter makes a good case for it.

One of those rare books that I will surely re-read many times.

Rating:
Summary: Back into (SF) time
Review: Baxter's narrative, especially the squid-pilots, is fairly compelling as noted by other reviewers. But Time is too reminiscent of others' stories and images, especially Clarke's (surprised Time won the Clarke award? it's a look-alike contest!) and Blish's, to seem particularly innovative.

Rating:
Summary: Manifold: Time
Review: The book is an extraordinary work of Sci Fi which is based on ideas and fact that have already been proven and written about in various scientific journals. The book comprises such a wide band of theories: front time travel to genetically enhanced squid to alternative universes. Further, there is human drama which seems even more exilerating considering the events taking place in the backgroud. All this, and much more, combined in one work of art.

I highly recommend the book.