Flood by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Jonathan McCalmont
The book spans 32 years in the lives of a group of people initially thrown together as hostages in a near-future
Spain that has collapsed into sectarian civil war. When the group emerge from their basement, they find a world
experiencing dramatic rises in ocean levels. Before long, members of the group are witnessing the flooding of
London and the shattering of New York's glass skyscrapers by a hurricane that fills the air with broken glass,
instantly rending apart all those unlucky enough to be caught outside.
The H-Bomb Girl by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Steven H Silver
The Cuban Missile Crisis was, of course, a major event in the United States and Soviet Union in 1962, but it also affected
other countries in the world. The book is a young adult time-travel/alternate
history novel that looks at the crisis from the point of view of a fourteen year old girl in Liverpool. Laura Mann has
newly arrived in Liverpool and must deal with the typical relocation issues, as well as an absentee father and parents
going through a divorce when her world is really turned upside down.
Emperor by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Steven H Silver
Spanning the reigns of emperors Claudius, Hadrian, and Constantinople, the Prophecy ties the descendents of Agrippina,
Nectovelin's niece, together through the ages, even when they have apparently lost all connection to each other. Each generation
also has its own way of looking at the Prophecy, true to their own period of time, but not necessarily to the Prophecy itself.
Transcendent by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Set millennia after the events depicted in Exultant, tens of
thousands of years have passed after the centralized government that was necessary for the conquest of the Milky Way has broken down
into many cultures, each pursuing its own evolutionary path. Alia is a young woman in that distant future, just coming of
age in her generation-ship home. Her life changes when a visiting stranger informs her that she has been chosen to become
part of the Transcendence.
Exultant by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Nominally a sequel to Coalescent, this novel tells the story of the climax of a twenty-five thousand year long war,
and the final human assault on the Xeelee stronghold at the center of the galaxy.
It's a war that is being fought by children. The economics and logistics of war have led to fast-breeding, fast-maturing humans
whose brief, fierce lives are completely devoted to fighting the good fight.
Coalescent by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by David Maddox
Millions of workers milling through corridors, looking alike, dressing the same, no specific leader, running on instinct and
pheromones just like an ant hill. But the denizens of the underground crypt are not insects. They are humans.
The author asks the question "What would happen if a group of humans
sealed themselves off from society for about 80 generations?" Would they still be human, or would they be evolving into
something... different?
Phase Space by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Steven H Silver
The author demonstrates his versatility in the 25 stories which have been collected here. While practically
all the stories are of the hard science fiction variety for which he is known, they run the gamut from the alternate
historical "Marginalia" and "The Twelfth Album" to the hard speculative science of "Sheena 5" or the problem-solving fiction of "The Fubar Suit."
Reality Dust by Stephen Baxter and Making History by Paul J. McAuley
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
Raise your hand if you remember the Ace Doubles. All right, that separates the old-timers from the younger readers. The
Ace Doubles were a series of paperbacks that featured two complete novels, printed back-to-back in the same volume. It was
extra value for the reader and allowed the publication of some books that might not have sold so well on their own. The form
died out as science fiction writers moved away from dependence on the magazines as their main outlet and SF novels became
longer and longer in the 60s.
The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by David Maddox
It all began over one hundred years ago with a simple inventor and his fantastic creation, a machine constructed of
brass rods and tubing, chronometric dials and a riding saddle. But this strange contraption had the ability to take
its passenger backwards and forwards through the fourth dimension, time itself! Such was the premise of H.G. Wells'
science-fiction classic The Time Machine originally published in 1895.
But what happened to the Time Traveler at the end of the tale?
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Origin by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
If this were a mainstream novel, it would have the words "literary experiment" written all over it. It
is the third, and final, book in a series that began with Manifold: Time and Manifold: Space. Each
book features nearly the same cast of characters, with 3 different versions of their history and their
lives. In a mainstream novel, the author would be focusing on the depth of the characters, with the background
differences used to illuminate the details of their existence. But this is SF and the point of writing 3
alternate histories of the same characters is not the characters themselves, but their part in examining one of the Big Questions.
Origin by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Nick Gevers
This is the conclusion of one of the most ingeniously conceived sequences of novels SF has
yet seen, a trilogy of cosmic iterations in furious revelatory dispute. The template is probably
Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias series (1984-1990), which imagined three
contrasting futures for the same section of California, embodied each in a novel with characters
and situations mapped to those in the others, and allowed echoes to ring and dissonances to sound,
all that utopia might take shape in the reader's mind. In the Manifold novels,
the author is about a similar parallelism of scenarios, but he is too ruthless an ironist
for utopia, preferring cosmological debate; and his Big Issue is the Fermi Paradox...
Longtusk and Deep Future by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Hank Luttrell
This is part of a series begun with Silverhair, about a mammoth
character who also appears to narrate some of the stories/legends about
Longtusk. However, each book in the Mammoth series is
complete in itself. It seems like a huge leap from the post-modern space
opera of the Manifold books to Earth's pre-history, and in
fact the canvas looks much different -- enough to make you want to check the
thumbnail bios to make sure they were by the same fellow. Deep
Future, is a non-fiction collection of essays which illuminate many of
the same deas and themes as the Manifold books.
Manifold Space by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Hank Luttrell
Reid Malenfant, a retired astronaut giving a lecture to a group of colonists on the moon, proposes automated
probes to other stars as an advance wave for expansion. His words become ominous when robots or perhaps a life form,
which to us resembles machines, are discovered mining the asteroids, echoing Malenfant's proposal for other
solar systems.
Manifold: Space by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by David Soyka
What is particularly neat about this is how it subverts the traditional space opera conceit of galaxies just sitting
out there waiting for human colonization. At the same time, just as it thoroughly belittles egocentric human notions
about our importance in an incredibly vast and uncaring reality, it embraces our sense of individuality and purpose
as possibly an underlying, maybe even defining, principle of cosmological sentience.
Longtusk by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Steven H Silver
As with Silverhair, this novel is the author's attempt to portray the mammoth in as realistic and
accurate a manner as possible while allowing for a certain anthropomorphic mentality to make their story
understandable to humans. Although ostensibly aimed at children, it is not written in a
condescending manner and is enjoyable for both children and adults, who can each find something in this coming-of-age story.
Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Greg L. Johnson
This collection is the work of an audacious and wide-ranging imagination,
resulting in vast cosmological speculation spanning the entire 20 billion
year history of our universe. Only at the end does the pace slow down
enough for us to get to know the characters as people, bringing cosmological
wonders down to a human scale, and allowing an emotional connection with
events far removed from our own time and place.
Moonseed by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Steven H Silver
It opens with a recounting of the Apollo 18 mission to Aristarchus
and the explosion of Venus. Neither event seems to have a major
impact on the lives of people on Earth. The rocks collected at
Aristarchus are sealed in decontamination units by NASA for decades.
One day, a small sample is spilled onto the ground...
Titan by Stephen Baxter
reviewed by Steven H Silver
In Steven's opinion, this novel shows that Baxter has continued to grow in
handling the technical details of the space program and writing. Unfortunately,
he found, in many ways, it seems like a step backwards
from an earlier Baxter novel, Voyage.
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