Manifold: Time

Manifold: Time's would-be asteroid-miner-in-chief is bootstrap space entrepreneur Reid Malenfant, a media-savvy firebrand who's showed those crotchety NASA folks what's what with his ready-to-fly Big Dumb Booster, piloted by a genetically enhanced super-squid. But Malenfant's near-term plans to exploit the asteroids get diverted when he crosses paths with creepy mathematician and eschatologist Cornelius Taine. Applying Bayes's theorem and a series of other statistical do-si-dos, Taine convinces Malenfant that an inescapable extinction event--the "Carter catastrophe"--is nigh, and that even working to colonize the galaxy might not be enough to save humanity. The answer: build a Feynman "radio" to listen to the future and, by detecting coded quantum waves traveling back through time, divine the fate of human "downstreamers" and find the key to their survival. Space flight, time travel, and even squid negotiations ensue, while Earth is gripped in Last Days madness.

Once again, the award-spangled Baxter gives us sci-fi at its beard-stroking best, with an imaginative, audacious plot line that's firmly grounded in good science, reminiscent of Baxter's own excellent Vacuum Diagrams. --Paul Hughes

Product Description
The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. As the world’s governments turn inward, one man dares to envision a bolder, brighter future. That man, Reid Malenfant, has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the exploration and colonization of space. Now Malenfant gambles the very existence of time on a single desperate throw of the dice. Battling national sabotage and international outcry, as apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, he builds a spacecraft and launches it into deep space. The odds are a trillion to one against him. Or are they?

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".


A romp through space and time   January 15, 2000
Jeffrey N. Fredman (Gaithersburg, MD)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful

Manifold:Time is a well paced, well thought out adventure through some of the more esoteric conceptions found in the outskirts of modern physics. The characters, and in particular the main character, who is a entrepeneur in the best sense of the word, for such an idea driven plot, are well developed. The author extrapolates a near term future in which NASA is a strangled bureacracy and the world is beginning to collapse, and without space based material, the world will not be able to continue to expand. Then an artifact is discovered, and perceptions about the world change. In order not to give too much of the plot away, I won't mention each of the different technical devices used, but I particularly like the concept of (I think it was called) Feynman transfer, where messages from the future might be beamed to the present, if only we were able to detect them. I found less persuasive the use of, essentially, Bayesian statistics with relation to extrapolations of population growth and human survival, since such ad hoc assumptions are approximately as accurate as the 7 day outlook on the weather for the seventh day. As a final point, I liked the symetry, similiar to that found in "The weapon shops of Isher", where events set in motion in the present can affect other parts of time and space, perhaps even in creative and wonderful ways.


You won't forget this book   February 27, 2000
Jason (Los Angeles)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful

You've got to admire Stephen Baxter for undertaking such a difficult project: an adventure across the slopes of time, evolution and the universe to find humanity's place. I think he pulls it off. Some of the concepts were difficult, but the characters are there searching for understanding as well. It's a fun and wondrous read. This book stands with 2001, Fantastic Voyage and even Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.


Gotta make way for the homo superior   August 23, 2000
Cartimand (Hampshire, UK.)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful

Baxter does it again with an immensely thought provoking blend of hard science and visionary fiction. Like its predecessors - the excellent Moonseed and Titan, Time starts in a world instantly recognisable to us. The impetus of the space race has long since died and responsibility falls on our entrepreneurial hero Malenfant to rekindle the dream. It would be inappropriate to include any spoilers in this review, but suffice it to say that each of the manifold sub-plots has enormous relevance to today's world; Cyberluddism, genetic enhancement, religious fundamentalism, SETI, ecological disaster and, perhaps scariest of all, the appearance in our midst of a next generation of humankind, so intellectually advanced as to generate resentment and homicidal hatred amongst the "normal" disenfranchised homo sapiens. I have always expected nothing less than mind-bogglingly grandiose scope in a Baxter novel and, for my money, Time is his most poetically creative to date. If one universe is not enough, let's have a dozen or a thousand! The fact that the roots of the novel are all based in genuine contemporary science adds to its substantial impact. Astonishing stuff!