Bryon Daly wrote:
I just recently read Stephen Baxter's first two Manifold books
(Manifold: Time and Manifold:Space). I'm wondering if anyone here
read them and what they thought of them.
For me, overall I was rather disappointed - enough so that I probably
won't bother with Manifold: Origin. Fortunately, I can do that
without missing "how it ends", because these books seem to be
alternate universe stories where some of the characters stay the same,
but (very) different & unrelated things happen. The book cover
descriptions don't make that clear at all.
I found the science and many of the ideas pretty compelling at times,
particularly in the first book (Manifold: Time), making it hard to put
down at points. But the first ending fell flat for me, and by the
middle of the second book I was starting to get annoyed (and its
ending also fell flat, IMHO).
Of the three I thought :Origin had the weakest start (I much prefered
the space, BDB building stuff which is glossed over in this one in
exchange for cultural anthropology which is just... yawn), but I think
it came together for the strongest ending.
All in all there are several books I prefer from Baxter, but the
Manifold trilogy was an interesting experiment. I think I might have
enjoyed it more if the three books tighter, smarter editing and were
compressed into three novellas in one volume, but that's just my opinion.
A few other comments:
Potential spoilers warning!
Potential spoilers warning!
Potential spoilers warning!
Potential spoilers warning!
- The first book starts in 2010, but inexplicably features technology
and governmental changes (ie: smart cars/highways, the sea floor
stuff, uplifted squid, California with its borders (the inter-state
ones!) closed to non-whites) that seem quite out of place for such a
near future setting. (They book is copyright 2000, but even if he
wrote it in, say 1996, a lot of this stuff seems more 2050-ish (at
best) than 2010-ish.) Why set a hard-SF book in such a near future
if you're going to posit things that belong much further out.
That was one of the points, I believe. Humanity was obviously
bootstrapping itself to run through history quicker each "iteration"
through the "great recursion". Having the near future be far future, I
think, was to help illustrate that that process had already happened a
couple of times since "our" Earth.
- The endless NASA-bashing started to bug me - I wonder if the NASA
guy he thanks in Manifold:Time knew he was going to do that (and later
go grief for it from his coworkers) or if he was disgruntled himself
and that's where Baxter got it from. Not that I think NASA is
perfect, but Baxter makes it seem like hugely ambitious, but near
flawless space missions can be slapped together in months from spare
parts. Baxter's books were written pre-Columbia but even so the
world's space mission failure rate is high enough to put a lie to
that.
I saw it more that he was pointing that the governmental NASA will
probably always be slower than private interests, particular a strong,
stubborn stereotype like Malenfant.
I didn't see it so much "bashing" as wink, wink, nudge, nudging...
Malenfant was a product of NASA, and even though he competed with them
in their efforts he still seemed to carry respect for NASA.
I also felt that he explained away NASA's uninvolvement in Malenfant's
projects because it put Malenfant much closer to the "Heinleinian rough
and ready male with tons of money and just as much ego and ambition to
reach the stars" stereotype.
- The biggest thing that bothered me, though, was Baxter's totally
apathetic and just plain pathetic depiction of humanity's reaction to
the events in space: Alien artifact on a near-earth asteroid?
"Yawn." Aliens colonizing/exploiting the asteroid belt? "Ho-hum."
Aliens on earth performing mysterious genetic experiments? "Who
cares." WTF? In the first book some of this apathy is (weakly)
explained by the (improbable) Carter-catastrophe hysteria and the
inexplicably precise 200 year apocalypse forecast. In the second
book, though, there's not even that - it's just that no one except the
few main characters cares.
Slightly more attention still in the next book. I saw it as Baxter
mocking popular culture for focusing on modern trivialities while real
major stuff is possible or going on.
How many people know what NASA is doing right now? How many people know
what the latest Brad Pitt relationship is?
--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/
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