Rating: 
Summary: The mankind: A loop evolution?
Review: I gave 4 stars to this book because the theme is very interesting; Baxter worked on an Earth threatened by an exponencial colonization wave coming from the deep space (directed by an allien especies called "crackers"). The concept is very original and is based in the fact that if the live flourish in almost every star system, in the most incredibles ways, is possible that the rate of growth of the population forces to colonize several stellar systems to survive, and in this process some worlds,inhabited or no, can be destroyed or exploited.
In this book Baxter speculates on the possibility of several processes of colonization like this one, happened through aeons and our system including our own planet has been affected previously.
All this is exciting, but the long periods of time included into the book make a little difficult to tie all the facts exposed. We can find some weakeness in some arguments like:
- If our evolution process was "restarted" in some time, securely our start point was very different and possibly our ancestors could had very different physical characteristics (Depending on the moment at which the Earth was affected). Into the book we find things like pre-historic animals, dinosaurs and Neardenthals returned to the life by the Gaijims to prevent the mankind extintion and start again. This sounds like a Gaijims eternal manipulationd that it is not sufficiently clarified.
- Nemoto is alive after centuries with medical manipulation, and is as if she had a secret for this known by nobody - not mentioned.
- The mankind lost all inventive, curiosity, technological advance, religions, with the incomming alliens (sound incredible to me).
..
Despite the previous details, i did enjoy the book, and found positive technical aspects like the accretion disc in a binary star system with a black hole, speculations about how would be the vision of the stars from a distant star system; so, I believe that something good can be found in the new book: Manifold- Origin.
Rating: 
Summary: As amazing as Time !
Review: I really looked forward to reading this book after having read Manifold Time ! I haven't been disappointed ! This is absolutely great, this books drives you everywhere in the universe on an immense time scale, it's breath-taking from the beginning to the end ! Manifold Time was based on the Carter catastrophe, here it's based on Fermi's Paradox, and explores every detail of the question. So well written. Stephen Baxter is really talented, i can't wait the the third book of the Manifold series !! BUY IT NOW !
Rating:
Summary: Another knock-out sci fi masterpiece!
Review: I was astounded by Stephen Baxter's first novel in the Manifold duo, Manifold: Time. Honestly, I enjoyed Time more than Space, but Manifold: Space is truly just as fascinating.Baxter has a wonderful job with his ability to flawlessly write true hard science fiction that incorporates real science into the story. He has done a beautiful job with Space. I would also like to note that if you are expecting to read Manifold: Time in this book, you will be disappointed. Space is a totally new story with new characters, and even a new Malenfant, for we also have a new universe (and NO, that is NOT a spoiler)! I will say that Space's plot unfolds similarly stylistically, but the story is a totally original and new sci fi experience that is equally magnificent to that of Time. This is truly a book for all science fiction lovers. I guarantee it! Enjoy! -Taylor
Rating: 
Summary: Good God! This book is bad.
Review: I've read a good 75% of the books that Stephen Baxter has read
and they're generally pretty good....I _LOVED_ Manifold: Time. This one is so bad that I couldn't make it all the way through
(I read 400 of 512 pages). It started off pretty well...the first 200 pages were really
interesting. Then there was a couple hundred page lull where
increasingly weird/unbelievable stuff kept happening only
often enough to make me think that perhaps it will get better. I stopped when Malenfant starts hanging around with Neanderthals
on some far out moon/planet peeing in his special spacesuit. (I bought a used copy....imagine how annoyed I'd be if I paid
full price for this hardcover?)
Rating: 
Summary: Thought provoking, but unfulfilling
Review: My impression of Stephen Baxter is as an author who is fun to read for thinking of "big" ideas, and with very interesting science stuff, though his prose is sometimes a chore to work through. This book confirmed that. The strong point of this book is in its thinking about how waves of colonization might spread across the galaxy, and the specifics of what each species may have as its goals and methods. In particular I liked the idea of the light-speed limiting bubbles which would contain the expansion of any given species. But overall I found Baxter's vision for humanity (and other races) to be rather pessimistic. He doesn't find it very plausible that the species would be able to manage its expansion at sustainable levels. I found this depressing, a future in which it's assumed we're unable to resolve our problems like this. My other complaint was actually that there were actually too many big ideas in the book. He has so many neat settings on so many different worlds. They were so many scenarios, but not many examined in much depth. (An example of this is the collision of Nereid into Triton to gain its resources.) Neat ideas, but they were passed over too quickly. They were all necessary for the development of the plot, though, so I guess the alternative would be to write a mammoth book like Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
Rating:
Summary: One of Baxter's weaker ones
Review: Not that I'll be misunderstood: I'm one of Mr Baxters biggest fans and most loyal readers, but "Manifold:Space" lacks a very important quality of a book: a coherent story that keeps the reader interested. Characters and their achievements light up for a few chapters and then disappear again in the vast maw of time.
"The most awesome ideas in science fiction today" rates "The Times" on the cover of my UK edition. That is not untrue - but unlike in "Manifold:Time", here Mr Baxter fails to weave those ideas into a gripping story - I repeatedly had to force myself to continue reading. Of course it is way more difficult to tell a story that spans centuries and millenia than one that only stretches the protagonist's lifetime and maybe it is the problem of us "mayfly humans" (compared to those mechanical aliens described in the book that "live" for millenia) that we find it hard to follow such eternal-like periods of time - but hey: we're the only life-form yet that can read (his) books ! And in "Time" Mr Baxters'ideas about the future of the universe and mankind as a part of it were at least as awesome as in "Space" - and nonetheless it was a thrilling, page-turning story. I hope that the proposed third one in this sequence, "Manifold:Origin", will take up the quality of "Time" and - although hardly possible, since its his best - "The Time Ships".
Rating:
Summary: Double shadows
Review: Obviously, when you are in binary star system you must cast double shadows, as Reid Malenfant realizes out there on Alpha Centauri. Stephen Baxters book (Space) cast at least two kinds of shadows. First there is the wonderful feeling of being an astronaut out there among the stars. And then, on a deeper level, there is the question of what it means to be a sentient living thing in the Galaxy. The Galaxy being such a big, big place with so much to explore and so much to learn about. I suppose 2001 is year 19 before the Gaijin, or so at least according to Space. 19 years before the cosmic "let the games begin". So there is still time to prepare for that strange environment called Space. And a good place to start preparing would definitely be the book Space. Manifold 1 (Time) was great, and this one Manifold 2 (Space) is just as good. So, now I am just looking forward to Manifold 3 (SpaceTime?). -Simon
Rating:
Summary: a depressing book about the dissolution and decay of mankind
Review: Okay, so this book might have been about more than the dissolution and decay of mankind, but that?s mostly what it felt like. Although some of the technical ideas in this book are interesting, there are no strong characters, the plot jumps around too much, and his version of humanity appears to be paralyzed with apathy. The worst thing about this book is the way people are portrayed. It seems like 99.9999% of humanity don't even care if another kind of life comes to earth. It's as if the whole world has somehow lost all curiosity and volition. To me, that isn't very realistic. Even if most people don't care about space, if there was something potentially threatening, at least the governments would be involved. But no, in his book, everyone seems willing to just roll over and play dead. Oh, except for his five or so main characters. And all of those characters appear to be indistinguishable, completely flat without any real emotion. None of them have any strong ties to any of the other characters and don't seem to have any real motivation. Although there are some relationships, none of them are any stronger than somebody felt sorry for someone else. I'm sorry, not compelling. It also appears that all of the action takes place just outside our point of view. There's a war, but it's elsewhere, we only hear about it second hand. Somebody gets upset, but you don't learn about their internal struggle, instead the book's focus stays with someone who watches them walk off. And every time you start to get interested in someone, the scene changes, and you're faced with a whole new set of people, who seem equally unrealistic and one-dimensional. In addition to the uninteresting main characters, his main premise seems to be that from here, things only get worse, that humans will lose all of their technological advances, and there is no way that closed biospheres can work, so that humans will never really be able to live off of Earth. What is the point of even writing about such a depressing view of the future? It doesn't motivate one to change, because you can't even figure out why people are behaving the way they do in the first place. The one saving grace of this book is the plethora of ideas to think about. So, the characters are boring, the plot is jumpy, but at least you have the concept of a universe where resources are key, and the whole bigger picture of how that would make creatures react, and what could happen over the millennia. Some of the other technology in the book interesting as well, from a 'how does it work' point of view. It does appear to all be well thought out and researched. Despite the positive technical aspects, I did not enjoy this book, and I think the only reason I finished it was due to my hope that something, anything positive would happen before it was over.
Rating:
Summary: a depressing book about the dissolution and decay of mankind
Review: Okay, so this book might have been about more than the dissolution and decay of mankind, but that?s mostly what it felt like. Although some of the technical ideas in this book are interesting, there are no strong characters, the plot jumps around too much, and his version of humanity appears to be paralyzed with apathy. The worst thing about this book is the way people are portrayed. It seems like 99.9999% of humanity don't even care if another kind of life comes to earth. It's as if the whole world has somehow lost all curiosity and volition. To me, that isn't very realistic. Even if most people don't care about space, if there was something potentially threatening, at least the governments would be involved. But no, in his book, everyone seems willing to just roll over and play dead. Oh, except for his five or so main characters. And all of those characters appear to be indistinguishable, completely flat without any real emotion. None of them have any strong ties to any of the other characters and don't seem to have any real motivation. Although there are some relationships, none of them are any stronger than somebody felt sorry for someone else. I'm sorry, not compelling. It also appears that all of the action takes place just outside our point of view. There's a war, but it's elsewhere, we only hear about it second hand. Somebody gets upset, but you don't learn about their internal struggle, instead the book's focus stays with someone who watches them walk off. And every time you start to get interested in someone, the scene changes, and you're faced with a whole new set of people, who seem equally unrealistic and one-dimensional. In addition to the uninteresting main characters, his main premise seems to be that from here, things only get worse, that humans will lose all of their technological advances, and there is no way that closed biospheres can work, so that humans will never really be able to live off of Earth. What is the point of even writing about such a depressing view of the future? It doesn't motivate one to change, because you can't even figure out why people are behaving the way they do in the first place. The one saving grace of this book is the plethora of ideas to think about. So, the characters are boring, the plot is jumpy, but at least you have the concept of a universe where resources are key, and the whole bigger picture of how that would make creatures react, and what could happen over the millennia. Some of the other technology in the book interesting as well, from a 'how does it work' point of view. It does appear to all be well thought out and researched. Despite the positive technical aspects, I did not enjoy this book, and I think the only reason I finished it was due to my hope that something, anything positive would happen before it was over.
Rating:
Summary: What a stinker.
Review: Only hard nerds need to pick this one up. As for it being "hard" science fiction, the only thing I found hard about it was trying to read it. I bought this thinking I'd like to take a chance and try something new. Big mistake. I confess it had some cool scenes. When Malenfant (stupid name for a protagonist), find the first "Saddlepoint" (stupid name for the point in space where the sun's elliptical magnetic field meets itself way out there) beyond Pluto and he steps out of his little spaceship (powered by some hard pulse engine) and floats through the void to be sucked into the warp point. That was cool, I guess. Other than that this book stinks. The principal aliens are this race of assymetrical crab like machine things with appendages sticking off haphazardly and they're mining our asteroids to feed their never ending need for more and more minerals. Wow, now that's hard. They take Malenfant under their collective wing and show him around the galaxy. So the hero gets to see all the other lost and confused races populating the howling void. There was even one where stingray like beings lived swarming all over their asteroids while their dying pulsar sun created and destroyed them over and over in a neverending cycle of creation and destruction. I guess the author is as confused as the rest of us as to the utter indifference of the universe to our pathetic little lives. The author is no doubt intelligent and this shows as the holes in the plot are miles wide, as if he couldn't take the time to fill it in with scientific explanations his mentally inferior audience wouldn't understand anyway. To be fair, I wasn't able to finish the thing so I could be treating his work unfairly. Anyway, the topper for me and the reason I put it down forever was the female Japanese scientist who, for some reason, is able to live hundreds of years while the earth goes through a catastrophic ice age and we all revert to scattered tribes fighting over the only available land that's somewhere in Africa. And she is always being mysterious and won't explain things to Malenfant until the time is right. If I was Malenfant(what a stupid name) I'd ask her how the hell she lived to be a thousand!!! She's like an "ageless techno geisha of infinite understanding and mystery". And I was about as interested in this thousand year old inept as I would be in Mr. Baxter's bunions. I can't remember it, I don't want to remember it. Uhhhhhggg. Oh, and only the Japanese survive to prosper because they're able to mine the moon (thanks to corporate American daring and know how) and supply their happy moonbase for as long as need be. Psshh.
| 
