Raft - Stephen Baxter

   1991; 303 pages.  New Author? : No.  Book 1 (out of 17) in the “Xeelee Sequence” series (so sez Goodreads).  Laurels: 1992 Arthur C. Clarke Award (nominated); 1992 Locus Award for Best First Novel (nominated).  Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Colonization Sci-Fi.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    Rees is a clever young lad.  No doubt he’ll go far in life somewhere out in the Nebula.

 

    But alas, not here on the Belt, where there’s only one job for all inhabitants: mining a burnt-out star kernel for ore.  It’s brutal toil and while Rees may be clever, he’s not physically built for hard labor.

 

    The ore is vital to survival on the Belt, since nothing grows naturally there.  Every so often, the privileged class who live high in the sky above in a place called the Raft, send down a transport device called the Tree.  It’s loaded with food, which they somehow have lots of, and are willing to trade for the Belt’s ore.

 

    Rees is determined to get off the Belt, even though that’s forbidden.  Raft people are Upper Class and mining people are Working Class.  The system only works when everyone knows, and conforms to, their social class.  However Rees is desperate, and has come up with an escape plan, albeit a risky one.

 

    Have I mentioned that Rees is a clever young lad?

 

What’s To Like...

    Raft is Stephen Baxter’s debut novel, and the first of 17 of his books set in the “Xeelee” universe, albeit many of which are novellas and short story collections.  In effect, this is a prequel, telling the backstory of how a ragged crew of humans arrived at, and subsisted in, a far-flung bit of the time-space multiverse where galactic physics has played out quite differently.

 

    There are actually two main storylines: the aforementioned class struggle with its inherent hostility; and a looming cosmic Armageddon that will wipe out the entire Raft and Belt colonies: the life-giving Nebula is dying.  Rees plays an integral part in both storylines.

 

     The world-building is unique and masterfully done.  There are no extraterrestrials (yet), and only a few strange space creatures, such as sky wolves, skitters, and flying whales.  The latter are sentient and reminded me of the dolphins in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

 

    I liked Stephen Baxter’s attention to detail in presenting this space world to the reader.  Time is now measured in “shifts” instead of hours or days; logarithms were found to be useful (which is something I’ve yet to discover here on Earth); and the classic situational-ethics dilemma of “too many passengers in the lifeboat” is still a vexing problem.

 

    The ending has a hopeful tone and sets the stage for the entrance into the far more expansive world of the Xeelees.  The primary plotline of what to do about the dying nebula is resolved.  Other plot threads remain up in the air, and will presumably be addressed in the next sixteen books.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.1*/5, based on 407 ratings and 40 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.69*/5, based on 4,055 ratings and 283 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Men don’t belong in this universe.  We came here in a Ship.  We passed through something called Bolder’s Ring, which was a kind of gateway.  Somewhere in the cosmos on the other side of the Ring is the world we came from.  It’s a planet, incidentally; a sphere, not a Raft, almost eight thousand miles wide.  And its surface has a gravity of exactly one gee.”

    Rees frowned.  “Then it must be made of some gas.”

    Hollerbach took the orrery from the shelf and studied the tiny planets.  “It’s a ball of iron, actually.  It couldn’t exist . . . here.”  (pg. 83)

 

    “Sir, the lists of passengers have not yet been published; and until they are it is up to all of us—”

    “They don’t need to be published.  We all know who’ll be on that trip . . . and it won’t be the likes of me.  Rees, I should have sucked your brains out of your skull while I had the chance down in the kernel.”  Roch held up a rope-like finger.  “I’ll be back,” he growled.  “And when I find I’m not on that list I’m going to make damn sure you’re not either.”  He stabbed the finger at Grye.  “And the same goes for you.”
    Grye turned ash white and trembled convulsively.

    Roch stalked off.  Gord hefted his jet and said wryly, “Good to know that in this time of upheaval some things have stayed exactly the same.”  (pg. 255)

 

“You’re a Boney now, lad!  Welcome to the arsehole of the Nebula.”  (pg. 163)

    There cussing is relatively sparse in Raft.  I counted just 20 instances in the first 20% of the book.  Most of those were damns, and I don’t recall any f-bombs in the entire book.  Often, the occasions for profanity were covered by made-up phrases, such as “bonesucker”, “by the bones”, and the oft-used social pejorative “mine rat”.  I love it when an author does this.

 

    The book is written in English, not American; so words are spelt, the mood can be sombre, and you can munch of airborne titbits.  If you’re perplexed by any strange spelling, you can look it up in an Encyclopaedia.

 

    The main issue I had with Raft, as did lots of other reviewers, was the way the science-y parts were presented.  The laws of physics in Raft are radically different from those governing our universe.  But instead of laying this all out at the start of the story, those differences are revealed piecemeal along the way.  This made for a difficult read.

 

    But enough quibbling.  I enjoyed Raft because it was an equal-parts blend of a “lost-in-space” scenario with some hard-hitting social commentary.  And it did this in a very “hard science fiction” manner.  The storytelling may be a bit rough around the edges, but it still got the job done and promises an exciting series to follow.

 

    7 Stars.  Book 4, Ring, has sat on my TBR shelf for quite a while.  Now that I've read Raft, I just have to decide whether to jump directly into its Xeelee-inhabited world, or first go looking for Books 2 and 3.  This is a pleasant problem to have.

Proxima - Stephen Baxter

   2013; 489 pages.  Book 1 (out of 2) in the Proxima series.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Colonization.  Overall Rating : 7*/10.

 

    It is an unprecedented opportunity.  One of the planets that orbits Proxima, the nearest star to us (not counting of our own sun), a mere four light-years away, appears to be able to sustain human life.

 

    Of course, four light-years is still a tremendous distance to travel, but this is 2155 AD, and there must be lots of intrepid people out there who’d love to be included on the first spaceship to another star system.  It would be just like being one of the Pilgrims on the Mayflower when it first set sail to the New World a half a millennium ago.

 

    Hmm. Come to think of it, life was pretty brutal for those settlers back in the 1600s.  Disease, hostile natives, and starvation all took their toll, and when things got tough, the nearest help was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  It’ll be even worse here: just sending an SOS message from Proxima back home to Earth takes four years.  So maybe we won’t get many volunteers for the mission.  Maybe we won’t get any at all.

 

    We better think of alternative ways to “recruit” settlers for the Proxima mission.  I seem to remember one method found to be effective was called “shanghaiing”.

 

What’s To Like...

    Proxima is a “hard science-fiction” novel, wherein Stephen Baxter presents a plausible scenario for traveling for the first time outside our own Solar System.  The two main protagonists are Yuri Eden, who discovers he’s been drafted to be one of the first colonists, and Stephanie “Stef” Kalinski, a leading authority on “kernels”, a high-energy/high-density ore-like material discovered on the planet Mercury.  Kernels can be used to build propulsion systems capable of unheard-of power, although Einstein’s principle remains sacrosanct: you still can’t go faster than the speed of light.

 

    Yuri arrives on Proxima around page 50.  Stephanie remains in our Solar System, although she planet-hops a bit.  Each gets his/her own storyline, and although you know they’ll eventually meet up with each other, trying to guess just how that's going to happen is one of the delights of the story.

 

    The first half of the book deals mostly with the challenges that the exoplanetary settlers face on Proxima-c, or, as they rechristen it, “Per Ardua”.  Stephen Baxter has a lot of fun speculating about what divergent paths evolution might take on a different world.  He also mixes in a dash of quantum mechanics, but to say more about that would entail spoilers.

 

    Critter-creating on Per Ardua is done sparingly.  It’s mostly confined to “kites” and “builders”, although evolution allows for lots of variety within both of those species.  I enjoyed flying through the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud on the way to Proxima, as well as the concept of “programmable matter”.  The use of a “silo” habitation system in harsh environments reminded me of Hugh Howey’s Wool trilogy.

 

    The history of Earth from the present to the start of Proxima was both detailed and thought-provoking.  Some reviewers didn’t like the way China was portrayed in this, but I thought it was eminently plausible and liked that the Chinese characters in the book were developed as 3-D entities.

 

    The ending is mainly just a stopping-point along the way.  It’s not a cliffhanger, but there’s a major and weird twist at the very end that changes the complexion of the tale thanks to one of the fascinating facets of quantum mechanics.  None of the plot threads are tied up.  It is important to realize that Proxima is Book One in a duology, with Book Two, Ultima, presumably assigned the job of bringing everything to a satisfactory conclusion.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.1/5 based on 32 ratings.

    Goodreads: 3.81/5 based on 5,960 ratings and 552 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

    Conurbation (n.) : an extended urban area, typically consisting of several towns merging with the suburbs of one or more cities.

 

Excerpts...

    “I am Angelia,” said the woman.

    That puzzled Stef.  “That’s the name of the starship.  The Angelia."

    “I know.  I am Angelia.  I know what you’re thinking.  That I am a PR stunt.  A model, hired by your father to personify—”

    “I don’t actually care,” Stef said abruptly.

    That surprised Lex.  “You’ve got an impatient streak, haven’t you, Kalinski?”

    “If somebody’s being deliberately obscure, yes.”  (pg. 31)

 

    “So you may as well keep going, right?”

    “Through another door, yeah.  And another.  What else is there?”

    “I’ll tell them what became of you.”

    Yuri grinned.  “Well, maybe we’ll be back to tell it all ourselves.”

    “You really think so?”

    “No.”  (pg. 449)

 

“I still say you’ve got big dreams for a bit of farm machinery.”  (pg. 146 )

    There are some things to quibble about.

 

    The book’s timeline is both extensive (2155 AD to 2217 AD; for a total 62 years) and non-linear.  There are valid reasons for that, which we won’t disclose, but it does mean trying to figure out where and when both Yuri and Stef are at any given moment is a bit of a challenge.

 

    As for R-rated stuff, the book is relatively clean.  There is some violence, mostly offstage, and a small amount of cussing (9 instances in the first 10% of the book), but nothing really lurid or graphic.

 

    Perhaps the biggest gripe is the pacing.  The first half of the book dragged at spots as the colonists try to avoid starving to death on Per Ardua.  But I imagine the Pilgrims had lots of tedious stuck-in-a-rut days too.  Things move along faster in the second half, but the bottom line is: this is a Hard Science-Fiction story, not a Space-Opera Star Wars type of tale.  Tediousness is a part of being a settler, and it beats being sick, starving, or having an arrow in your throat.

 

    Lastly, it bears repeating that this is not a standalone novel.  When you decide to read Proxima (at 500 pages), you’re really signing on to read Ultima (another 500 pages) as well.

 

    7 Stars.  It’s hard to give a proper rating to Proxima since I haven’t read the sequel yet.  Ultima is on my TBR shelf, awaiting my attention, and it will be interesting to see whether the weird tone-shifting plot twist plays out for better or for worse.

Exultant - Stephen Baxter

   2004; 472 pages.  Book 2 (out of 4) in the “Destiny’s Children” series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Hard Science Fiction; Speculative Sci-Fi; Time-Travel.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    They captured a Xeelee nightfighter!  No one ever accomplished that before, and these two pilots – Dans and Pirius – somehow came up with a brand-new strategy that netted them an enemy starship.

    What's more, the tactic used FTL (“faster than light”) technology, so it dumped them back in time two years, which means the human military forces have a bunch more time to study the nightfighter and figure out how to finally outmaneuver them in battle.  That’s never been done before either.

    Sadly, Dans gave her life in the fight, so it’s only Pirius and his flight crew (a navigator and an engineer) that returned home.  Still, I'm sure they will be properly rewarded for their amazing exploit.

    They were.  All three were tried in court, found guilty, stripped of their ranks, and banished to the vilest prison in the universe.  Their crime was unforgiveable – disobeying a direct order.  They’d been told to launch a suicide attack, instead, they turned, fled, and somehow ended up capturing their Xeelee pursuer.

    To boot, Pirius’s “two-year younger self” (going back in time will cause these sort of temporal paradoxes) is also put on trial, for complicity, and found guilty.  After all, it’s obvious that the seeds of disobedience were already there, and we can’t allow some "future order disobeyer" to remain free.

    Let the punishment fit the future crime.

What’s To Like...

    Exultant is set 20,000 years in the future, and opens on the fringe of the gigantic black hole at the center of the Milky Way.  Mankind has marched its way across the galaxy, conquering all in its path, but now faces its greatest threat, the Xeelee, who have three distinct advantages over us:  a.) their star ships are better than ours, b.) they’re smarter than us, and c.) they have the power of “foreknowledge”, meaning they know what we are going to do even before we think of it.

    The book is an ambitious attempt at “hard science fiction”.  Stephen Baxter builds a universe as realistic as possible, imagining technology that’s 20 millennia ahead of our time.  Huge advancements have been made in Quantum Mechanics, including FTL spaceflight and time-hopping, and I liked that, unlike most other sci-fi writers who eschew time paradoxes, Stephen Baxter revels in them.

    I was intrigued by the core philosophy he proposes.  Mankind’s existence is at stake, and therefore adopts a “hive colony mentality”.  Innovation is deemed a crime, everyone is assigned a role in the hive, and you are expected to willingly give your life to preserve it.  That’s why Pirius’s decision to flee, instead of complying with the order to sacrifice his starship, results in such a draconian punishment.  Concepts like love and family are taboo; the hive has no place for anything that might interfere with one’s total submission and loyalty to it.

    It’s fun to watch how both Piriuses (Baxter labels them “Blue” and “Red” for the sake of clarity) learn to coexist with their “other self”, including how to accommodate their bunkhouse “squeeze” Torec, who sleeps with "both of him".  There are critters aplenty, both on the microscopic and macroscopic scales.  Books are considered ancient artifacts, and described as “blocks of paper you hold in your hand”, and there’s even a small nod to synesthesia (a “green scent”).  And for those who like their sci-fi laced with quantum physics and cosmological stuff, there's lots of time-travel, time paradoxes, black holes, and dark matter in the story, plus an extended visit to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

    The ending is both twisty and exciting.  For the moment, the day is saved for the good guys, although some of them perish in the ultimate battle.  The bad guys are pushed away, but not defeated, and no one doubts for one minute that they will return with a vengeance.  Which, one presumes, will take place in the book’s sequel

Kewlest New Word ...

Sclerotic (adj.) : becoming rigid or unresponsive; losing the ability to adapt.

Others: tranche (n.); sessile (adj.).

Excerpts...

    To the Xeelee, humans were vermin – and they had a right to think so, for they were superior to humans in every way that could be measured.  And so, only if each human were prepared to spend her life without question for the common good would humanity as a whole prevail.  This was the Doctrinal thinking taught in seminaries and cadre groups and academies across the Galaxy: if humans must be vermin, humans would fight like vermin, and die like vermin.  (loc. 319)

    “Perhaps I’m existing in somebody else’s memories, or dreams.  Perhaps Pirius Blue dreamed of Earth before he died, and everything I think is happening to me is happening inside his mind, in the last fraction of a second before the starbreaker hits –“

    “And maybe you’ve got your pointy head so far up your own ass it’s coming out the other end.”  She punched his kidney, hard enough to make him yelp.  “Is that real enough for you?”  (loc. 5867)

Kindle Details…

    Exultant sells for $8.99 at Amazon.  Books One and Three in the series go for $6.99 (Coalescent) and $7.99 (Transcendent).  ANAICT, Book 4, Resplendent, isn’t available at Amazon as an e-book, which is odd, and it looks to be a compilation of novellas set in the Xeelee universe.  Stephen Baxter has a slew of other sci-fi books, ranging from $2.99 to $10.99, including a number of collaborations with other prominent science-fiction authors.

In the quietest hours of the night, when the rats sang, you could still hear weeping.  (loc. 3756 )

    There's a fair amount of cussing in Exultant, although I wouldn’t call it excessive.  Most of them are familiar terms, but I also liked the made-up ones, such as “Lethe!” and “My eyes!”

    In the last/third section of the book, the chapters flip-flop between our macro-sized universe and a microscopic one, where a host of strange creatures – monads, quagmites, etc. – reside.  This felt clunky to me, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it impacts the events in the next book.

    Finally, while there’s no doubt that the quantum physics concepts that the author proposes are deeply-researched and logically intriguing, the frequency with which everything grinds to a halt while they are explained slows down the pacing noticeably.  Thankfully, this habit is discarded for the ultimate battle, which makes for a great ending.

    But fear not, Stephen Baxter’s writing skills more than make up for these quibbles.  The character-development is superb, and I found his technological predictions for a time 20,000 years to be absolutely fascinating.  And hey, it’s great to see a sci-fi writer who has no fear of temporal paradoxes.

    7½ Stars.  The Destiny’s Children series is a subset of Stephen Baxter’s “Xeelee Sequence” series, which, per Wikipedia, totals 9 novels and 53 short pieces.  The only other book in this series that I’ve read is Book One, Coalescent, and I don’t think it's necessary to read it before this one.  Ditto for any of the other Xeelee novels; I was unfamiliar with them, but quickly grasped their role via-a-vis us humans.

The Long Mars - Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett

   2014; 445 pages.  Book #3 (out of 5) in The Long Earth series.  New Author? : No, and No.  Genre : Hard Science Fiction; Multiverses.  Overall Rating : 4½*/10.

    You and I would call them “Multiverses”, but in the near future (2040 AD or so), when humans first learn how to transverse them (which they call “stepping”), the preferred term is “the Long Earth”.  Each parallel world is different, often only marginally so, but you are always in the same geographic spot.  If you "step" from Oshkosh, by gosh, you still end up in the same geographical spot on the neighboring "Earth".

    Oshkosh may or may not be there, of course, depending on how the timeline played out in that particular dimension.  So here’s a handy tip:  Don’t ever go stepping from the basement of a house.  In the next Earth, you may find yourself ten feet underground, buried alive.

    Just how many multiverses are there?  No one knows, but earlier “stepping voyages” have made it across millions of Earths.  Perhaps the answer is “infinite”.  Or maybe we should say “double infinity”, since you “step the other direction” and return through the worlds you came from.

    Now there is a new revelation.  If you journey to Mars (in a few select multiverses) and “step” away from there, you come across what appears to be a whole new set of multiverses, based on the timelines of Mars, not Earth.  And it’s pretty obvious what we should call that phenomenon.

    The Long Mars.

What’s To Like...

    There are three main storylines in The Long Mars, each one getting about equal time.  1.) Captain Maggie Kauffman heads a two-ship expedition across the Long Earth determined to set a new record for the number of multiverses in one direction.  There are whispers that some of her passengers have ulterior motives for making the journey, but no one has any details.  2.) Sally Linsay and two others start the inaugural voyage across the Long Mars, and it's anybody's guess what to expect on that trip.  3.) Joshua befriends a precocious-but-troubled youth named Paul Spencer Wagner to try to figure out why he’s so extraordinarily bright.

    I thought the writing was well done, which you’d expect from Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.  The story takes place mainly in the US, which is impressive given that both authors are British.  The story is written in English, not American, so your flashlight is called a torch, your grey and ageing plough might be made of aluminium, and you have tyres on your car.

      I liked the nods given to other writrs of science fiction and fantasy, including Tolkien, Niven, Clarke, Asimov, and Herbert.  There was an obscure (for me) nod given to one Chesley Bonestell, which I had to look up in Wikipedia to understand.  The Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, also gets a nod, and I smiled when some Dune-esque sandworms appeared.

     The emphasis here is on “Hard Science Fiction”, and I think the aim of the authors was to give some idea of what it might be like if we ever did discover how to explore multiverses.  The inclusion of the “beanstalk” apparatus was a nice touch in this regard.  There is a minor story thread concerning rejuvenation, which I’m hoping will be followed up on later in this series.  And the brief mention of canisters of sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide gave me a chuckle; I’ve worked with them both in my career.; they make thiosulfates.

    There are lots of space beasties to meet and avoid being eaten by.  The trolls, elves, kobolds, and “First Person Singular” are all from the previous two books; now we get to deal with talking cats, beagles, sentient crustaceans, and “the Next”.  And thanks to multiverses, we learn that the Plural of Mars is “Marses”.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Extirpation (n.) : the act of totally destroying or killing off of something.

Excerpts...

    “I do see that going through a soft place would be like wearing seven-league boots, Wotan – may I call you Wotan?”

    “No, you may not.”

    “But it would help if I understood how you can make these seven-league-boot jumps.”

    “Actually a better metaphor for a soft place is a wormhole.  A fixed passageway between two points.  As in the movie Contact.  You remember that?”

    “Is that the porno where-“

    “No.  Stargate, then.  What about that?  Oh, for some modern cultural references.”  (pg. 211)

    They weren’t like ordinary kids in the way that the nearest of them immediately rounded on Joshua when he stepped in with Paul, all armed with bronze knives, and a couple further out with raised crossbows.

    “It’s OK,” Paul said, hands held high.  He squirted out some of the high-speed babble.

    Joshua was still subject to suspicious stares, but the knives were lowered. (…)

    “What did you say to them?”

    “That you’re a dim-bulb.  No offence, Joshua, but that was obvious to them already.  Just from the way you looked around, with your jaw slack.  Like you showed up dragging your knuckles, you know?”

    “A dim-bulb?”  (pg. 261)

“You look as blank as a chimp faced with a banana fitted with a zip.”  (pg. 212 )

    Sadly, the disappointments I encountered in the previous book in this series, The Long War, reviewed here, continue in The Long Mars.  There is no advancement of the overall plot of this series, whatever that might be.   Even worse, the story is almost devoid of any action, a sci-fi requisite.  Here’s a list of every bit of excitement (without spoilers) over the course of the book:

a.) one gunshot is fired, but it's of no consequence,

b.) the survivors of a wrecked spaceship are found, with minimal intrigue ensuing.

c.) a being dies, onscreen no less, but it has no consequence on subsequent events,

d.) there’s a jailbreak, but it happens off-screen and we aren’t given the details.

    That’s it.  The rest of the book is predominantly character interaction and world(s)-building.

    The ending is mediocre at best.  The three storylines are hastily tied together, but nothing gets resolved.  Things close with Maggie listening to a scholarly debate about the plusses and minuses of extirpation.  Yawn.  Overall, it felt like the only purpose for The Long Mars is to set up events in the sequel.  At least I hope it does that.

    One last disappointment: The Chinese depicted in the book are markedly stereotyped. They're uncooperative with Maggie and her crew, only give vital food shipments for a starving Earth if attached political strings are complied with, and should first and foremost be remembered for their  repression of Tibet.  It would've been nice if some of them were a bit "gray" in character.

    4½ Stars.  I’m beginning to think this is one literary collaboration that just didn’t work out well.  The Pratchett wit is completely missing here, along with any semblance of a story.  Maybe each author was afraid to mess up whatever plotline the other was planning.  Two books remain in this 5-book series, and there's no doubt that I’ll read them.  But I no longer expect much out of this series.

The Time Ships - Stephen Baxter

   1995; 530 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Time-Travel; “Hard” Science Fiction; Speculative Science Fiction; Sequels.  Laurels : A slew of them.  Overall Rating : 7½*/10.

    It was going to be a simple thing, really.  Easy-peasy.

    Our hero/narrator had a successful maiden voyage into the far future – to 807,201 AD to be precise, and returned home chastened, but safe and sound.  H.G. Wells found his manuscript detailing the journey, and published it to enormous acclaim back in 1895, calling it The Time Machine.

    But one regret remains, one loose thread, one piece of unfinished business.  Weena, the lovely Eloi girl that our hero became so enamored with, had to be left behind, captured by the evil Morlocks and sure to be their next meal.  Something our hero was powerless to stop, since he was fleeing for his life.

    Yet now, back in his own time, he’s reflected on this, and has come up with a remarkably simple solution: jump into the Time Machine, head out to 807,201 AD once again, land a couple hours earlier than before, and rescue Weena.  He knows where the Morlocks will lie in wait (Time Travel has some inherent advantages), and the Morlocks will never know what hit them.  It’s a well-thought-out plan.  What could possibly go wrong?

    Well, to quote the great Morlock sage, Nebogipfel, “Cause and Effect, when Time Machines are about, are rather awkward concepts.”

What’s To Like...

    To commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the publishing of The Time Machine, the H.G. Wells estate authorized Stephen Baxter to write a sequel.  The result was The Time Ships, and judging from the number of awards it won and/or was nominated for (listed below), they made a good choice.   The Time Ships is an epic Hard Science Fiction novel, and fully integrates events from The Time Machine (along with numerous nods to other H.G. Wells tales) into its storyline.

    The novel is divided into 7 “books”, plus an Epilogue, each one covering a ‘”jump” in time by our never-named protagonist and his newfound sidekick , a Morlock named Nebogipfel.  The jumps encompass the full temporal spectrum – to both the end of Time itself, and way back to before the Big Bang.

    Along the way, our heroes examine a number of serious themes, such as democracy, God, war, nuclear bombs, forced sterilization (which really occurred in the US back in the 1920’s), and evolution.  Interestingly, the Morlock viewpoint is often at odds with the Human one.  Stephen Baxter also has one huge advantage that H.G. Wells lacked – a century in the development of Quantum Physics.  So things like Multiverses, Temporal Paradoxes, Dyson Spheres, and Sentient Artificial Intelligence are also encountered.

    I was particularly impressed by the treatment of Temporal Paradoxes, such as “what happens if I go back in Time and kill my earlier self?”  A lot of Time Travel novelists take pains to skirt these situations; Stephen Baxter revels in them.

    Outside of our two chrono-hoppers, there aren’t a lot of characters to keep track of, and for all the new worlds we visit, not many new species to behold.  There are the Humans, Morlocks, and Eloi, of course; but besides that, just some post-dinosaur flora and fauna, and the epitome of Evolution – the Universal Constructors.

    The titular Time Ships don’t appear until page 447, and I learned what a Catherine Wheel is (the fireworks, not the torture device) and who Kurt Godel was.  I never did figure out what an Everett Phonograph was, nor when and where Filby fit in; but I was happy to see the nod to the town of Staines (I’ve been there!) as well as Henri Poincaré, whom I recently learned about (see the review here).

    There were four neat drawings interspersed throughout the book, although they might not be included in every edition.  77 chapters cover 520 pages, so you can always find a good spot when you want to stop reading for the night.  The entire book is written in the first-person POV.  I read The Time Machine as a preparation for The Time Ships, but in retrospect, I don’t think it was necessary.  The ending won’t be to everyone’s taste.  It has a “2001 – A Space Odyssey” feel to it, but I can’t picture an alternative way to end things.

Kewlest New Word ...

Rum Cove (n., phrase) : a dexterous or clever rogue (possibly a Britishism).

Others : Perforce (adv.); Lenticular (adj.); Peripatetic (adj.); Farrago (n.); Benighted (adj.).

Excerpts...

    I could see again.  I had a clear view of the world – of the green-glowing hull of the Time Ships all around me, of the earth’s bone-gleam beyond.

    I was existent once again! – and a deep panic – a horror – of that interval of Absence pumped through my system.  I have feared no Hell so much as non-existence – indeed, I had long resolved that I should welcome whatever agonies Lucifer reserves for the intelligent Non-Believer, if those pains served as proof that my consciousness still endured!  (pg. 455)

    An infinite universe!

    You might look out, through the smoky clouds of London, at the stars which mark out the sky’s cathedral roof; it is all so immense, so unchanging, that it is easy to suppose that the cosmos is an unending thing, and that it has endured forever.

    … But it cannot be so.  And one only need ask a common-sense question – why is the night sky dark? – to see why.

   If you had an infinite universe, with stars and galaxies spread out through an endless void, then whichever direction in the sky you looked, your eye must meet a ray of light coming from the surface of a star.  The night sky would glow everywhere as brightly as the sun…  (pg. 472)

“You and I – and Eloi and Morlock – are all, if you look at it on a wide enough scale, nothing but cousins within the same antique mudfish family!”  (pg. 106)

     The biggest plus to The Time Ships is how well Stephen Baxter manages to capture the writing style and storytelling of H.G. Wells.  Paradoxically, the biggest minus is also how well he captures that writing style and storytelling.

    Science Fiction has come a long way since H.G. Wells penned The Time Machine.  There’s a lot more action now, and a lot more world-building.  I still enjoy reading classic Sci-Fi stories, but I’m also thankful they’re generally less than 200 pages in length.

    Here, we have 500+ pages of century-old Sci-Fi.  The pace is slow, and while Stephen Baxter gives the reader a lot to think about, there aren’t a lot of thrills and spills.  True, this is also inherent in any Hard Science Fiction book that’s done properly.  But if you’re looking for a science fiction novel with galaxy-invading aliens and a protagonist with a liberal libido, you probably should skip this one, and do an Amazon search for “Space Opera”.

    7½ Stars.  Per Wikipedia, the laurels The Time Ships garnered are:  British Science Fiction Award – 1995 (winner); John W. Campbell Memorial Award – 1996 (winner); Philip K. Dick Award – 1996 (winner); British Fantasy Award – 1996 (nominee); Arthur C. Clarke Award – 1996 (nominee); Hugo Award – 1996 (nominee); Locus Award – 1996 (nominee); Kurd-Lasswitz Award, Foreign Fiction – 1996 (winner); Premio Gigamesh Award – 1997 (winner); Seiun Award – 1999 (winner).  Wowza!

The Long War - Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter

   2013; 422 pages.  Book #2 (out of 5) in The Long Earth series.  New Author? : No, and No.  Genre : Science Fiction; Multiverses.  Overall Rating : 6½*/10.

    The Colonials are revolting!  Some of those “steppers” who have transported themselves ("stepped") into parallel universes have sent a sort of Declaration of Independence back to this world (aka “Datum”).  It seems they’re tired of being taxed by the Datum government for some very minimal services.

    The Datum government is reacting!  They’re sending a bunch of military airships, including the Benjamin Franklin commanded by Maggie Kauffman, on a “goodwill tour” to those uppity otherworlds, reminding them of their taxation responsibilities and showing them a sample of the armed protection it provides.

    The trolls are retreating!  Apparently being used as cheap and menial beasts of labor, they’re stepping away to other multiverses.  Or maybe just one specially-chosen dimension.  Nobody is quite sure where they’ve gone to hide out.  Hey, someone should talk Joshua Valienté, the original stepper and a living legend, into heading out to find them trolls.

    But Joshua’s retired now, happily married and raising a kid out in the sticks in some piddling little town called Hell-Know-Where.  And while he still might have a wanderlust bone or two left in him, it’s a good bet that his family won’t be thrilled if he gets talked into to travel again.

    Especially since it’s an old lover who comes knocking on his door, calling him to adventure.

What’s To Like...

    The Long War is part of a “hard” Science Fiction pentalogy that explores the popular Quantum Physics concept of multiverses.   It is a collaboration of the talents of Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, two of my favorite authors.  It feels like Baxter contributed a lot more to this book than Pratchett, possibly due to the latter’s health issues, and it's set in 2040 AD, 25 years after the first “Step Day”.

    The reader is introduced to a slew of characters right away, and it is advisable to take notes of who’s doing what and traveling where with whom.  The characters quickly separate themselves into 4 or 5 storylines, mostly dealing with exploring the millions of other dimensions, which was also the main theme of Book One, The Long Earth.

    The main topics addressed whilst everyone goes exploring are: Slavery – using the trolls as the persecuted race; Colonization – presented with a rather balanced viewpoint; and Sentience – when is a species intelligent enough to be communicated with instead of eaten?

    The chapters are short – 69 of them for 422 pages, and the book is written in English, not American.  There are lots of creatures to meet – the aforementioned trolls, elves (who are baddies here), kobolds, bipedal wolves, walking tortoises, some nasty beagles, and crest-roos.  Oh yeah, and a talking cat named Shi-Mi.  I also liked the music references – Jim Steinman, John Lennon, Bonnie Tyler, The Kinks, and Buddy Holly.  And I appreciated the tip-of-the-hat to Robert Heinlein and the esoteric Ginnungagap.

    It would’ve been nice to have a brief “The Story So Far” section at the beginning, and even a Cast of Characters, since it’s been a while since I read Book One.  I liked the thread of a western child prodigy exploring with a Chinese expedition, even if there was a bit of trite stereotyping of Chinese culture.

    Pratchett’s wit shines through at times – such as the naming of one of the characters Bosun Higgs, and the concept of “the Outernet”, sort of a multi-world Internet.  But Baxter’s influence predominates in epic sci-fi fashion.  It should be noted that there is some cussing.   The focus is on the diversity of the multiverses, and it was a joy to watch Pratchett/Baxter describe the various worlds.  I never got tired of visiting a new world.

Kewlest New Word. . .

Glebe (n.) : a piece of land serving as part of a clergyman’s benefice, and providing income.

Others :  Irruption (n.); Scry (v.).

Excerpts...

    “Lobsang did this to you.”

    “He did,” she said warningly, “though he used some careless talk from you as an excuse to do it, young man.  We’ll have to have a serious chat about that.”

    “How?  I mean-“

    “Either I was downloaded from my poor dying brain via some kind of neural scan into a bucket of gel, or I was brought back by Tibetan monks chanting the Book of the Dead over my already interred corpse for forty-nine days.  Lobsang tried both ways, he says.”

    Joshua smiled weakly.  “That’s Lobsang, all right.  Always have a backup.”  (pg. 164)

    He knew how she felt.  It was the way he felt, sometimes, if he woke in the small hours, at three a.m., a time when the world seemed empty and stripped of comforting illusion.  A time when you knew you were a mote, transient and fragile in a vast universe, a candle flame in an empty hall.  Luckily the sun always came up, people stirred, and you got on with stuff that distracted you from the reality.

    The problem for Roberta Golding was that she was too smart to be distracted.  For her, it was three a.m. all the time.  (pg. 343)

Humanity … was nothing but the thin residue left when you subtracted the baffled chimp.  (pg. 238 )

    The Long War gets low marks from lots of reviewers over at Amazon, and deservedly so.  First and foremost of the issues is what I call “PWP?”, or “Plot?  What Plot?”  Basically, there is none.  Our various teams of protagonists traipse all over the multiverse, but mostly they're just on sightseeing trips.  Some token action befalls Joshua late in the story, and there’s a seismic occurrence (on several dimensions) at the very end, which is essentially a cliffhanger (I hate cliffhangers) and presumably serves as a teaser for the next book.

    I kept waiting for the titular “Long War” to start, and was informed with about 50 pages to go that it had come to an end, which totally astounded me  There wasn’t any shooting and killing in this “long war”, and I’ve yet to figure out if the title refers to the uppity colonists or the disappearing trolls.

    Maybe this is an inherent drawback from two authors collaborating on a novel.  Perhaps Pratchett thought Baxter would provide the plotline and Baxter thought Pratchett would.  In fairness, it should be noted that Baxter epics are sometimes light on the action and long on the drama, but that’s Hard Sci-Fi for ya.  It’s also possible that Pratchett’s health issues prevented him from adding a ton of his trademark wit to the series.  He did a much better job of that when he collaborated with Neil Gaiman in Good Omens (reviewed here).

    6½ Stars.  The somewhat-blah storyline is saved by the masterful writing skills of both Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, but just barely.  I’ve read the first two books in this series, and have #4 and #5 on my Kindle.  Now it’s just a matter of deciding whether to skip Book 3, The Long Mars, and "step" directly to the last two books in this series.

Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice - Stephen Baxter

   2012; 339 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Episodic Sci-Fi.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    Times are tough at the Mnemosyne Cincture, a mining operation on one of Saturn’s moons.  The parent company, Bootstrap, Inc., is not pleased with the falling profits, nor at the delays in getting the precious Bernalium ore from there to Earth.  Equipment keeps coming up missing, and sabotage is suspected. Then there are the hallucinations that the younger children claim to be seeing, which they’ve labeled the “Blue Dolls”.

    But something down there has attracted the attention of the TARDIS, and that means that the police box that is not a police box, along with its passengers - Doctor Who and his sidekicks, Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot - are about to be  transported there (and then), and get drawn into all the strange events and politics.

    Maybe our protagonists can straighten everything out there.  Or maybe they’ll bring about the end of the world.

What’s To Like...

    Full disclosure: While I’m vaguely aware of the (British) television series “Doctor Who” and its cult following, I’ve never watched an episode of it, and had no idea exactly what the TARDIS was when I bought this book.  It caught my eye primarily because its author, Stephen Baxter, is one of my favorite sci-fi writers.

    The three protagonists – the Doc, Zoe, and Jamie – are all well-developed and fun to meet.  This apparently is set in the “Doctor Who #2” timeline, which will mean something to fans of the series.  The pacing is brisk, and the storyline sufficiently complex to keep my interest.  The chapters are short and there are some kewl “Interludes” interspersed throughout the book.  Doctor Who – Wheel of Ice is written in English, not American, and I'm always partial to that.

    The main storyline – the mystery surrounding the Blue Dolls – was engaging, although not particularly twisty.  Beyond that. there were a couple of interrelated themes running  through the book.  The first – when is a species sentient enough to where we coexist with them instead of eating them? – is fairly common for the sci-fi genre.  But the other – does Artificial Sentience have any inherent rights? – was a new (to me, at least) and fascinating concept.

    The ending is good enough, although I found it to be a bit too convenient when the Ultimate Evil got her just desserts.  I liked the tip-of-the-hat to one of my favorite classics – Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.  I also enjoyed the catchphrases – “Resilience, Remembrance, Restoration”, “Community, Identity, Stability”, and my personal favorite “It’s good to be a B!”

Kewlest New Word ...

Cludgie (n.) : a toilet or bathroom (a Scotticism).

Others: Nous (n.; British); Swotting (v.; British); Allohistorical (adj.); Kettling (v.).

Excerpts...

    “Surely this ship has an automated defence system!”

    “Oh, Zoe, of course it has.  But if it wasn’t disabled, don’t you think I’d have activated it by now?”

    “Disabled!”

    “I have been meaning to get around to looking into it ...”   (pg. 13)

    Every day started with a decision: which end of the makeshift colony’s shabby little recycling plant to visit first.  The plant was a rough row of hoppers and processing machines, white boxes joined end to end by pipes and ducts, all the components pinched by Sam and his cronies from Utilities up on the Wheel.  You did your personal business at one end, and then let the engines process the waste, extracting nutrients and adding Titan meltwater and tholin chemicals to flavour.  And out the other end came breakfast, things like biscuits that weren’t biscuits, bowls of stuff like mushroom soup that wasn’t mushroom soup.  It was a little factory with a cludgie at one end and a soup dispenser at the other.  Charming.  (pg. 179)

“Isn’t this what life is for, granddad?  Skiing on a moon of Saturn!”  (pg. 91 )

    Although he did a creditable job in penning Doctor Who – The Wheel of Ice, I don’t think anyone is going to call this Stephen Baxter’s finest literary effort.  This is not his fault; it is inherent to the nature of the undertaking.

    Overall, the story reads like a television script.  Think of any episode from, say, one of the Star Trek series.  Fun, entertaining, but hardly epic.  And the makers of the Doctor Who series certainly would want nothing that would outshine their BBC series.  So perhaps these sort of constraints were imposed upon Stephen Baxter going into the project.  I felt the same thing when I recently watched the “Rogue One” Star Wars movie.  It was enjoyable, but I felt like it was taking care not to steal the spotlight from Episodes 1-7.

     This is not a complaint.  I came away with a better understanding of the Doctor Who cosmos, and DW-TWoI kept my interest from beginning to end.  But it can’t compare to some of Baxter’s major novels, such as Evolution or the Manifold trilogy.

    8 Stars.  Add 1 Star if you’re already familiar with the Doctor Who universe.  And even if, like me, you’re a Doctor Who newbie, it's a nice way to learn the basics of the series.