Rating: 
Summary: awful
Review: awful, awful, awful. One of the three unfinished books in my reading career, and I am actually proud of that fact.
Rating:
Summary: awful
Review: awful, awful, awful. One of the three unfinished books in my reading career, and I am actually proud of that fact.
Rating: 
Summary: a bleak Gulliver's Travels for the 3rd millennium
Review: Baxter's Space is the Gulliver's Travels of modern science fiction. I mean this not only in terms of narrative convention (hapless traveler is propelled from one tableaux to the next to showcase the author's agenda, in this case, a grab-bag of the myriad forms life might take in various environments), but of repute, as well: with Time as his launching point, Baxter takes cyclopean strides, earning the hallmark "classic" and instantly vaulting into my Top Ten Greatest Sci-Fi Novels of All Time. Baxter has come a long way from what I label the "pajama sci-fi" of his Xeelee sequence: cheeseball crews running around in their jammy-jams like something from Star Trek: the Motion Picture or Invaders from Plan 9. Baxter's ideas were always there, but his Michael Crichton School of bland prose was a great detraction. No more - he's battened down the hatches on sloppy writing, his characters have distinct voices, and the greatest improvement of all, his dialogue has gone from Vaudevillian melodrama to the downright profound. Baxter refreshingly skips hashing out the trials of his characters and gets to the nitty gritty: one sentence, Malefant is reasoning out how he can get to a deep space "Saddle Point," the next sentence, he's there, and who cares how he swung it?All this, and the ideas are still there; each chapter bursts with an astonishing new Big Idea that forces one to pause and give a Keanu Reeves "whoah." The final onslaught of the Cracker fleet and Nemoto's soliloquy is the most deliciously bleak scene I have read in sci-fi since the end of Orwell's 1984. Here's hoping Baxter's Darwinian vision of space colonization is totally wrong. I, for one, am still waiting for enlightened beings to descend from the heavens and help us save us from ourselves. Space is not perfect - the micronized space-ship with no plausible explanation from a race that Baxter repeatedly stresses has comparatively primitive technology is particularly irksome, and Baxter can sometimes hit you over the head to make his point (there's no need to use "Darwinian" as an adjective twice on the same page - I get it already), but these are minor annoyances. It's the power to make you cower like an insignificant mote against the howling void, to go slack-jawed with wonder and awe as you gaze out over alien vistas, to make you still ask after witnessing 10,000 years of human evolution, "Is that all there is?" Baxter dishes it up in droves and he's unlikely to pull it off again, so if you're going to read only one, this is it. Finally, my glib answer to the Fermi Paradox: we exist, but we're not there... Fudo Myo
Geneva, Switzerland
Rating: 
Summary: Amateurish
Review: Having read all of the hullabaloo on the back cover, I was suprised by the amateurish writing within. The main redeeming qualities of this book are in the scientific ideas it contains, which are pretty interesting. The story itself is poorly written.
Rating:
Summary: truly bad
Review: I don't understand the glowing reviews of other readers. bad characterizations, stupid names, no discernable plot and depressing. oh, and once in a while a clever idea. after 200 pages I couldn't take it any more and threw it out. read Benford or Brin or Vinge if you want to see what *good* sci-fi written by a physicist is like.
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: 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: 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: 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: Lost in space
Review: Thank you, you other reviewers on this website. Without you, I would have understood far less of this book. Not being a sci-fi buff. This book has great value because it makes us realize how small we are, compared to the larger scheme of things. Where will we be when the the years in which this book is set (3800) come around? In Heaven, maybe? Which brings up the spiritual aspect of the book, which few reviewers mentioned. I got a sort of Buddhistic concept from the author's tone. This rather fits in with the fact that one of the protagonists is a Japanese woman, Nemoto, who lives from scene to scene in a metaphysical way. Also, the inhabitants of the Moon are Japanese. The Buddhistic element in the book is embodied in the idea that as humans, we believe we are separate and autonomous individuals. But maybe, like computers, we are just electronic impulses with an aggrandized view of ourselves. Pre-programmed at the factory, melted down and recycled when the newer generation of computers takes our place. Buddha taught something similar, didn't he? Dissolving the ego? In this context, there is a character in the book, somewhat minor really, named Dorothy Chaum. She was really the most interesting character, because she starts out working for the Pope trying to convert aliens and Extra-terrestrials. She ends up something far different than a practicing Catholic, something more like, what, a Buddhist? And when you're flying around from galaxy to galaxy, visiting Venus, Triton, a strange Earth, seeing and feeling all sorts of strange feelings, living too long, who wouldn't be a Buddhist by then? Anyway, there is little mention of Christ, but he must be flying around there somewhere also, wouldn't you think? Well, this book is worth reading, but only the patient will be able to finish it. Diximus.
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