This is the first time I have ever read Stephen Baxter, and already I am anxious for more of his work. This book was probably one of--if not the--most imaginative sci-fi novels I have ever read. It starts out with the Time Traveller, determined to save Weena--the Eloi girl he left behind in the far future--taking another fateful trip into the future. But instead of a repeat of the original Wells book, but with a save-the-damsel-in-distress storyline, it turned into an epic journey through alternate histories and future worlds that are just astonishing as you read the book.

It takes you to visions of alternate futures, as well as pasts, such as a sphere around the sun, a war-torn Earth of 1939, the Paleocene era of fifty-million years ago, an alternate reality with machines as the heirs of man, and finally to the most fantastic vision of an infinite universe created and ruled over by the true power of the human Mind. The book closes with the Traveller being returned to his own reality so that he is able to go and save Weena in the far-off age of 800,000 years hence(I wont give away the ending).

Throughout the book, Stephen Baxter gives you insights into the world of Quantum Physics, an aspect that brings the book to have a more real-world feel than some bizarre odyssey. Stephen Baxter is a true visionary. Someone who is able to see the current trends of science and incorporate them into a masterfully executed story. This book, in my opinion, is among the greatest sci-fi masterpieces of all time. The story never gets too technical, but never reaches down to the level of a child-like fantasy story. It is a story not only about time travel, but about the nature of mankind itself. but the most important thing that this book teaches you is that no matter where you are, or what you do, the future is a world of infinite possibilities and it is up to us choose the right ones throughout our lives. For who knows what the future holds? Possibilities, my friend. Possibilities, indeed.

As a life-long fan of H.G. Wells, I must say that I avoided picking up Baxter's book for several years. I doubted that anyone could seriously improve upon the original novel. When I came across a relatively undamaged copy of "The Time Ships" in a used bookstore, though, I finally decided to give it a try. Needless to say, I became so engrossed in the story that I finished the five hundred plus page book in three days. Although Stephen Baxter appears to be a scientist by training, he is much better at seizing and maintaining the reader's attention than many authors I have recently read. While continuing the narrative voice of Wells' Victorian Time Traveller, Baxter radically expands the scope and depth of the original universe, incorporating many modern ideas about causality, parallel worlds, and quantum mechanics. The fact he does so without overwhelming the reader but instead inspiring a genuine sense of wonder and awe is an achievement in and of itself. Baxter also makes a number of allusions to Wells' other fiction, including the use of Plattnerite, land ironclads, and a vision of nuclear and conventional warfare between Britain and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, all of which are amusing to those of us who recognize them as the story progresses. In the end Baxter doesn't so much surpass Wells as simply take the original tale to a whole new level, extending and reinterpreting it for a twenty-first century audience.

Though being an ardent sc-fi fan, I have never read Time Machine by H.G.Wells, so when I started this book, I approached it with a bit of trepidation. I thought I was stepping into the deep end, and I would be hopelessly lost.

I was wrong.

and more wrong, I could not have been, this book, though a "sequel", is independant in it's thoughts and it's scope. It's writing explodes into your mind, titilating your imagination.
though the notion of parallel universes, would be known to any sci-fi reader worth his salt, never has it been explored, exploited and executed into a story so well. Though the scientific premise of this story is sound and invigorating, Baxter never lets it to dominate, he keeps in mind that this is a book and above all, it is meant to be read and to entertain. The story continues as he explains and educates, the plot progresion is one of the most seamless I have seen in a sci-fi novel.

If this book shows anything of Baxter's promise, it is that if he continues like this, in time his name would be remembered with the likes of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlien.

Buy this book, you will and can not regret it.

This is the second Baxter book I've read (after VACUUM DIAGRAMS), and like the first it's a mix of brilliance and disappointment.

Baxter unquestionably has the wildest hard-physics imagination in the business. The world depicted in FLUX is a staggering conceptual achievement, taking the amazing concept of neutron-star life first suggested by Frank Drake and developed by Robert L. Forward in DRAGON'S EGG & STARQUAKE and going one step further, creating an ecosystem within the neutron-superfluid mantle of the star and exploring its whole geography from crust to core. The biology, locomotion and senses of the inhabitants are well worked out.

But Baxter's imagination tends to outrace even him. In both his books I've read, there have been major flaws in logic, points on which he failed to think his ideas through. Here, for story convenience, he asserts that the nuclear-size humanoids' life and thought processes happen at normal human speed. Readers of Forward will see the absurdity of this. The nucleonic processes on which this life is based are a million times faster than chemistry, because the particles are so much closer together. Even if it were possible to slow these people's life cycles so much in proportion to the underlying processes, they'd be agonizingly slower than the native organisms around them, living on a slower timescale than even the plants. There are other moments of shortsightedness; sometimes he describes them in humanlike ways incompatible with the anatomy and physics he's defined. (How could Dura have "slick palms" when they don't perspire?)

When the reason for these micro-humans' creation is finally revealed, it doesn't make sense. It would've been more logical to build mindless robots for the task, and ones better-designed to fit the environment. The creators' choice to make them almost exactly human down to the same impractical anatomy and the same emotions and aspirations shows a sentimentalism fiercely incompatible with the project's goals.

Baxter also gets confused about the scale of his trademark structure, Bolder's Ring. In VACUUM DIAGRAMS he said it was millions of light-years across -- yet described an attack on its rim affecting its center instantaneously, and described a distant observer seeing the battle across its whole width in real time. And here, he describes it appearing tiny from a distance of mere thousands of light-years. Baxter seems to have trouble realizing the physical and temporal scope of his own creations. His imagination is bigger than his judgment.

Baxter's a far better writer than Forward, but as in Forward's books, the plot is basically an excuse for illustrating the environment and physics. His characters have a modicum of emotion and personality, unlike Forward's, but are sometimes superficially drawn and hard to get a handle on. The one sexual interlude is painfully awkward and gratuitous from a character standpoint, serving only to illustrate the mechanics of the act for this species. (And let's not go into Baxter's seeming obsession with bodily functions. He could've chosen a more pleasant term for biological jet-propulsion.)

Amid the superlatively exotic setting, the society is relentlessly ordinary and unimaginative. The sociological storyline replays the mythology of countless British WWII films (and American films about Britain, such as MRS. MINIVER) -- a stratified society is torn apart by disaster and becomes united, promising to rebuild as an egalitarian utopia. It's tacked on quite awkwardly here. Overall, Baxter pulls the reader in two different directions -- in the environment and physics he strives for unimagined wonders, but for the people and society he pulls against that and forces them to be as mundane and familiar as possible.

FLUX portrays the most extraordinarily alien, yet credibly developed, physical environment I have ever seen in SF. But this just throws the book's flaws and its ordinary storytelling into sharp relief. And Baxter's failure to think through all the ramifications of his own ideas, and the huge logic gaffes that result, are a continual frustration.

Stephen Baxter is practically the hardest of Hard SF writers around. 'Flux' is another volume in his sprawling Xeelee Sequence of novels and short stories. The Xeelee Sequence doesn't have to be read in any particular order as the stories told span a timeline of tens of billions of years. Readers can dip in and out of the novels and collected short stories at any point.

'Flux' tells the story of Dura, one of a microscopic species of human who live in the mantle of a star. Hers is a feudal society with strict stratification of the different classes. Verbal history tells of a once more technological society now lost after the Core Wars. Sounds preposterous, I know, but Baxter's greatest strength is that, despite the heavy duty science in his works, he never loses sight of the human element. His story of Dura, an upfluxer and her adventures in Parz City and beyond, is so engaging that the reader can forget that the technicalities of the story and enjoy the adventure.

Through a series of good, bad and dumb luck, Dura finds herself at the center of an expedition that is the only hope of saving the Human Beings in her particular star. Through her tribes legends of the Xeelee she is able to engineer a meeting with a Colonist - a denizen of the core of the star, a downloaded copy of the original humans to seed the star with Dura's people - and formulate a plan that will save all the species of humanity from destruction. And consequently re-engineer a fairer and more just way of life.

It's hard to find Science Fiction these days that actually has some science in it. Baxter is at the forefront of the rebirth of Hard SF. Do yourself a favor and read one of his books. I guarantee you it won't be the last.

The review by Christopher is articulate and accurate regarding the imperfect story in Flux. However the environment and senario are so wonderfully drawn and described that weaknesses in the story are a minor distraction in the work of the facinating author.

This novel is a step up from Baxter's well done first novel, Raft. In this case, his writing is much more tight and clear.

As for plot, this one is fascinating. I don't think that the topic of time-travel will ever lose its interest for me; in this case, Baxter was able to maintain my interest consistently throughout the book. Moreover, he adds other oft-used, but always interesting topics such as alien opressive rule and interplanetary communication. I have learned that there are more books about the Xeelee and now I want to find out more about these mysterious creatures who have such advanced technology. Baxter is indeed a master of "hard" sci-fi.

On the negative side, I was disappointed with the ending that in some ways was predictable and awkward. Nonetheless, he kept the theme provocative and thoughtful

I found Stephen Baxter quite by accident in an airport bookstore. I picked up 'Titan' and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I decided to get all his books and start reading them from the beginning. I was fascinated by the Xeelee Sequence thread through his early works. Raft was very interesting and Baxter's immense imagination caught me by surprise.

I've just finished 'Timelike Infinity' and could not put the book down. It is hard SF with some deep descriptions of black holes, event horizons et al but it is a superb read. While this is hard SF, I think Michael Poole's character was well developed without giving away some secrets about how he knows all the astro-physics stuff (that comes later I hope).

All in all, a terrific read for SF'ers who want a good story, a quick read, threads to future books, and an imagination that is difficult to find nowadays.

Oh, by the way, I've read accounts of other Baxter books and there are references to the fact that the Xeelee Sequence books are standalone books. Perhaps, but my advice is to start at the beginning and work your way through the 5 books beginning with Raft. While the stories are definitely set in different era's, there are plenty of references made in each of the books I've read so far that the chronology is necessary

This large book caught my eyes! I love a time-travel story. The characters go through wormholes. These are tunnels in space-time connecting different times ans places. This book was written by someone with enough experience to do the job very well. The way the time machine is formed by moving appart the ends of wormholes is almost easy to believe. We travel to other times and one character worries about a time paradox. People from the future should not tell anyone in the past anything... Suppose the design of the time-travel device is explained to a scientist by the older version of himself. Then he didn't really work it out. He just copied himself. Noone would have been the genius who came up with the amazing idea... Then if really noone worked it out how did it come into existance? There is also the constant worry of preventing your own existance while you are in the past! This is known as the grandfather/mother paradox. Suppose you go back in time and kill you grandmother when she was a baby. You could not have been born making it impossible for you to go back in time or do anything at all... If you were not able to kill her you would have been born allowing you to commit the deed! A paradox is logicly inconsistance. In other words it does not make sense. If you could do these things without breaking physical laws there would be no paradox... I won't spoil the story for you but pay attention to what the writer is showing you. It is a useful book as it goes into theoretical physics in great detail. It suggests pulling a microscopic wormhole out of quantum foam. Some scientists consider seriously doing this. Physicists like Kip Thorne have suggested ways in which a wormhole could be used for time-travel both to the past and to the future! Clever physics is used in Timelike Infinity to great effect in allowing a time machine. It's amazing what Einstein's general theory of relativity implies. If we could travel faster than the speed of light we could travel back in time...

In the year 3000 at least earth time, Icebones awakens from an extended suspended animation to realize she is not on her native planet anymore, but instead is at the top of Olympus Mons, the highest known mountain in the solar system. Even stranger is the behavior of the herd of her kin, woolly mammoths. They complain of starvation, but have no concept of feeding themselves. Instead they had been spoiled from when their former masters, the earthly humanoids, took care of them. Now the humans have deserted their pets on Mars.

Icebones realizes she is different from the other members of her species. The human scientists regenerated them all but she was born in a more natural manner enabling her to understand mammoth history, legend, tradition, and most importantly how to survive in the wild. Against some opposition, she becomes the leader and begins the journey across the planet where food and water might exist so that the species can live.

ICEBONES, the concluding novel of Stephen Baxter's imaginative personification of Woolly Mammoths, is an engaging science fiction tale that readers will enjoy. The story line requires a stretch to accept yet the audience will want to read this novel in one sitting. Fans will appreciate Icebones, a heroine who recognizes her responsibility to guide the unruly herd to the promised land and does not shirk away from doing the right thing though that would be easier on her. This is a strong epic morality tale that holds up with its two predecessors quite nicely to provide an entertaining insightful trilogy.

Harriet Klausner

This informative biography tells the complex story of William III of the United Provinces (Netherlands) Born in 1648 at the end of the 30 Years War, William must learn to navigate the fratious system of Dutch politcs which is deeply divided and ant-autocratic, but at the same time must struggle to survive against the encroachments of Louis XIV' France. In order survive the Dutch must allow power to be centralized in the office of the Stadtholder, which by right belongs to the ruling house of Orange. It is during the desperate War of 1672-78 that William is called upon to become States-General, in charge of all combined Dutch land and naval forces. Through sheer grit and determination William manages to rally thre faltering Dutch forces before the seeminly invinceable advances of the French under their talanted generals.

The French under the Duc de Luxambourg and others mainatin the largest and most aggressive army in Europe. These are the years when France seeks to create a greater hedgemony. Population and ecomonic growth has blessed France since it was largely spared the devastations of the 30 Years War earlier in the Century. Now under their highly autocratic monarch, Louis XIV (The Sun King), they seek to dominate Europe. They have impressive resources to do this. Vaubin is the genius of siege-craft. Under his brilliant direction one Dutch fortress after another falls as the French armies advance deeper into the Spanish Netherlands and the Low Countries. Only the dogged determination of William is there to stop them. Each year another major Dutch or Spanish Netherlands fortress falls, but William holds out long enough to wear the French down. Louis begins to tire of the tangled web of Dutch fortifications and William's determination to keep a field army together. The French become interested in bullying the German principlaities instead. William is given a repreive and through various loosely worded treaties which the French constantly keep changing, he manages to save the Dutch Republic. For this alone William deserves to be known as the George Washington of the Low countries.

But fate has a larger story for Dutch William. Through marriage to Princess Mary, the protestant daughter of King James II, William has a direct claim on the English crown. This is brought into play when the English parliament seeks to remove James for his pro-Catholic and auto-cratic ways in 1688. The Glorious Revolution as it is known in England brings William and Mary bloodlessly to the English crown and forever changes
Anglo-Dutch history. William now has a new lease on life and can bring the larger resources of England into his greater conflict againt the dominations of Louis XIV. The Nine Years War will see William first campaigning in Ireland to defeat James II at the famous battle of the Boyne in 1690. This watershed moment in Irish History is little understood today despite numerous pictures of the event hanging in many Irish pubs around the world! William will then return to the Continent and continue the struggle against the French. The battles of Stenkirk (1692) and Landan (1693) are largely inconclusive but prove Williams increasing abilities of generalship over Louis XIV's armies. The siege of Numur (1695) is Williams crowning military achievement. He here manages to beseige and take a fortress designed by the great Vaubin. The myth of French invincibility in this period is finally broken. France, exhausted under Louis's harsh domestic and foreign policies must seek peace for the time being.

William continues as joint monarch of England and the Netherlands. The English will see themselves established as a leading maritime and commerical power, while the Dutch will beigin their descent into non-entity. Yet, for all that William does for the English he is not generally liked by them and is regarded derisively as "Dutch" William. The Dutch will tend to have an indifferent attitude toward him in their history.

Williams place in history covers the histories of two nations (England and Holland) and his influence extends beyond into Ireland, the Spanish Netherlands, Germany and even France. Louis XIV, despite numerous attempts to assassinate him, comes to respect William. The Dutch and English will have mixed feelings, and to the Irish he will become a distant almost mythical figure. There is no doubt that his legacy was the salvation of Europe from a French universal monarchy under Louis XIV. Dutch William may be largely forgotten today, but his struggles helped to shape modern Europe.

This book, while extensive on William' life, is at times tedious. The author's discussion of the complicated court politics and dynastic claims of the period was at times quite confusing. His descriptions of English politics is equally hard to follow. The author can not totally be blamed for this as the dyanstic politics in the 17th century were extremely confusing. The author writes with evident admiration for his subject, and seems to truly admire William almost to the point of excess. While not a great Biography in terms of style and writing, the subject and the historical period are fascinating.
Until a better and more recent work on William III comes out I would strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in the military politics and dynastic history of the 17th Century.

I am an avid fan of "hard" science fiction - stories where accurate, highly detailed science is so integral to the plot that the book would not function without it. Moonseed places well in this category. Baxter is very adept at creating a boogeyman out of cutting-edge scientific theory, and his characters use science and modern technology in a complex, intellectual manner to solve the problem. His choice of a geologist as protagonist was interesting, and it worked; this is the first hard-SF novel I have read where an intimate knowledge of geology provided the key to resolving the plot's main conflicts. Baxter's handling of science reminds me of decorated hard-SF veteran Gregory Benford - and that is high praise.

An even better point was Baxter's description of Earth-Moon travel. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever daydreamed of a successor to the Apollo program or of going back in time to plant a moon-boot in the regolith next to Neil Armstrong. I would venture to say that this book is really *about* returning to the moon, and that the Moonseed is merely there to provide an excuse to do so. Regardless, it is a fun vicarious journey.

With all the above traits to recommend it, this book should have qualified for five stars. But it didn't. Baxter clearly loves and knows his science, but whenever he strays from it - say, into character development, or the more mundane details of life - his writing suffers. Characters sometimes do things that don't seem consistent with their personalities. Details are dropped or glossed over. For example, a man with badly cracked ribs can barely move in one scene, but only hours later is walking around with little hinderance. Astronauts forget some fairly basic elements of mission planning in a manner that is too obviously a plot device to set up a later scene. And too many characters decide to give up their lives in various suicidal endeavors, with no real development of _why_ the person no longer wishes to live.

I don't advise you to avoid this book, because it has some unique good qualities. But limit your expectations.

By page fifty I was considering putting this book down out of frustration at waiting for something to happen. But I decided to skim for a bit, give it another 25 pages, and I am very glad I did. The first portion of the book builds slowly, emphasizing character development, and starting around page 74, the whole thing takes off (ahem) like a rocket: the next 580 pages or so flew by.

I was surprised into laughter when I saw that some recent reviews here complain about the book's "fantasy," unsympathetic characters, and "hard science nihilism." None of those accusations have any connection with this novel. The science is detailed and constant without being tedious, the characters are sympathetic without being sappy, and in retrospect the overall tone of the book is remarkably hopeful.

Read this book. If you like hard, human science fiction, you'll enjoy it.

What you need to know: "Moonseed" uses a slightly fantastical premise (an alien rock-eating nano machine/creature which can eat worlds) to create a beatifully detailed and poignant Earth destruction scenario. The beginning however is far too slow and could have benefited from some judicious editing. This is especially felt when the main character spends at least a hundred pages describing the city of Edinburgh in minute detail (lovely city though it is). All is forgiven however when the main story begins to pick up pace, steadily building up in tempo and suspense in a manner which puts the likes of Greg Bear to shame. What also separates Baxter from the masses is the sheer level of detail and believability in his plotlines (not to mention credible characters, an all-too common failing in sci-fi). The mission to return to the Moon, for instance, was put together using only existing technology. The description of the Terraforming of the Moon itself is also highly believable and entertaining. The clincher for me however, was that the ending was true to the rest of the book - no Titan-like weird stuff here! My vote? Four out of five.

Baxter is very good with up-to-date science, and if you want a science lecture on stellar dynamics, dark matter or singularities, this is a good textbook for you. But if you want a highly engaging story with developed characters, I'd skip this one. Mr. Baxter's editor must think that characters are just window dressing, in which case the characters in Ring are perfect, because they display all the life signs of a group of mannequins.
Although the science is generally very well used, there are plot inconsistencies which really bothered me. For one thing, this story is supposed to take place in two time frames: 1000 years and five million years. This little detail seems to be ignored when in comes to showing character development and technological development. 1000 years is seemingly enough time for the technology to have improved quite a bit. Five million years should have enabled technological development to answer all the problems faced by the crew of the Great Northern. I have to say that the only reason I finished this book was because I was on vacation and had nothing else to read. It was, I think, about the driest read I've had since the last Rama book.

While reading Baxter's novel "Ring", one will more than quickly realize why this kind of fiction is named 'hard science fiction'! There's an incredeble amount of physics, astrophysics and whatever other physics there is in that novel. Baxter tries to explain his highly sophisticated ideas as plain as possible--and still fails. That is not to say that "Ring" is a bad novel. Even though "Ring" lacks real characters and emotion (as most SF novels do), the plot is superbly innovative and because of its gigantic scales more than impressive. This is a tough book with a lot of boring passages that are due to the scientific explanations, but I still recomend this novel to any experienced SF-reader who is used to the modern authors of this genre.

Alright; the characters are sketchy, the writing is patchy and the pacing is interrupted by long info-dumps. Fine. If you don't like Hard Sf don't read this book. If you do like a rattling space adventure which not merely nods at science, but is actually inspired by it, then Ring is for you. Particularly impressive at the audaciouness of it all, the scope, the way Baxter reinvents standard SF tropes. A strangely gothic tale for Hard SF, as well; a story of people battling to survive in a dying and hostile ruled beings greater than ourselves, and incomprehensible to us. Baxter understands the majesty of decline and entropy better than the American SF writers (Post imperial Britain and all that), and uses it. The reaction reminds me of what Thomas Disch said of Hal Clement (another hard SF great); '...dense, but so is pecan pie.' Dense, and rich with ideas.

I would like to say from the outset that even though the foraging, encountering pitfalls and dodging predators was a tad tedious, Baxter's portrayal of our evolving progenitors throughout the ages was brilliant. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Having said that, I think this book is not for everyone. I would not characterize the bulk of this novel as purely science fiction. I liken it as a thesis that offers a serious and credible account of how events most likely transpired in near and distant past and a discerning speculation into the near and distant future. However, Baxter does provide elements involving a cursory look at cryogenics, solar system changes, and robotics.

If one is especially interested in anthropology, paleontology, evolution, or in my case simply having a penchant for all sorts of scientific endeavors, then most likely the book would gratify.

As a long-time student of science, my jaw dropped when I saw this book on the shelf and I immediately gave over my credit card and rushed home with this book.

First, the bad:
The same old Politically Correct song and dance, ad nauseum. A female African scientific genius tries to help save the world from Christian "cultists" and white male capitalism. I've nothing really against this notion of a story, but modern sci-fi is just dripping with PC, and I sometimes dream of a holiday from it. My eyebrows raised when Baxter noted that the poor monkeys were driven to extinction by a hunger for monkey meat in Africa (that didn't sound very PC, plausible or no) but then he finally added that this was in large part due to "European" loggers and the threat of heterodoxy was laid to rest.

Also, some of Baxter's flights of fancy were a little too far off the beaten scientific track: intelligent dinos, air whales, and Antarctic dinosaurs.

However, all of these criticisms cover a small portion of the story and in and of themselves are not reasons to avoid the novel.

The Good:
Baxter obviously loves these little anthropolical stories he's woven together. They are informative and compelling. A previous reviewer found them boring, but not me. I've enjoyed them quite a bit. They are epic in scope and leave me dwelling on the science of the tales, long after they're over.

A giant, juicy book full of the classic SF sense-of-wonder. Stephen Baxter does nothing less than take us on a journey from the dawn of primate life -- Purgatorius, the first primate, which appeared just before the comet strike at the end of the Cretaceous -- to the far, far post-human future. There's a sweep to this that reminds one of the last section of H. G. Wells's THE TIME MACHINE, which isn't surprising, given that Baxter previously wrote a wonderful sequel, THE TIME SHIPS. EVOLUTION is an ambitious novel, and a very important work.

Not a bad story all round, though it sould be taken with a grain of salt. It is meant as a humorous light-hearted little tale, and as long as you read it in that vein, you won't be disappointed. Personally I found the "super" industrial revolution to be a very intriguing idea, and I really liked that Baxter wasn't afraid to depict man's more bestial side, in turning this "miracle" of Anti-Ice to violent ends.

I'd had a bad experience with Baxter (also known as Timelike Infinity) which had me prepared to ignore anything he wrote. But I'm a sucker for alternate history and Victoriana, so when I heard that Baxter had written an alt-history in which 19th century England gets its hands on antimatter (Kaboom!), I just had to give it a try. And I was pleasantly surprised at how good it was.

This book works on a lot of levels. The use of the naive protagonist alongside the newspaper reporter and the professor allows for a lot of exposition without straining the plot. Once you accept the hand-waving explanation of how antimatter got to Earth in a form that 19th century tech could handle, the rest of the technology and history follows pretty logically. And the writing itself is a wonderful pastiche of Wells, Verne, and 19th century English novels in general.

But the aspect of it that I most enjoyed was the political allegory. The parallels of anti-ice technology with nuclear technology followed our own history in many ways: its first use followed by horror at the devastation that it wrought, then an attempt to harness it for peaceful purposes, and finally a cold war in which two super-powers hold weapons of mutually assured destruction. But more subtly, England's domination of France at the end of the book, and France's resentment, could be seen as analogous to US domination of Europe after WWII.

A wonderful science fiction story, but also a lesson on the dangers of the misuse of power, whether it be the destructive power of weaponry or the political forces of imperialism.

I really enjoyed this book! Like all of Baxter's work it just seems to have a heck of a lot more meat on its bones than a lot of what I read. Good speculative SUBSTANCE, if you know what I mean. Yes, I had to pick up an encyclopedia and read a few paragraphs on the Crimean War. Took all of two minutes and added exponentially to the depth of the reading experience. Good book, good ideas and a whopper of a finale!

Baxter's novel Manifold: Time is a mind-boggling exercise in concrete scientific concepts put to theoretical use. It is interesting, well-written, and intellectually stimulating. But it has rather thinly drawn characters, and the ending, which is perhaps meant to be uplifting, strikes a depressing note.

Baxter tells us his story using multiple points of view. Some characters appear once, and others many times. We occasionally feel some emotion for them, but not much, because they rarely seem fully realized. This book is enjoyable if you wish to read about informed concepts (Baxter has a doctorate in aeroengineering research), and it is successful enough to have been nominated for the 2000 Arthur C. Clark Award. But don't read it for a human story, unless you're interested in one on the galactic scale.

I found Manifold Time quite an enjoyable read. The story was replete with unexpected (and sometimes expected) twists and turns. I found a few of the main characters in the story to be quite engaging and likeable, although the heroine's character seemed a little silly at times. Stephen Baxter does an absolutely amazing job at surprising his readers. As the story unfolds you find yourself being taken down one seemingly tangent path after another, all the while coming closer and closer to the realization that what Stephen Baxter is weaving around you is not a plot, but rather a web of time. Once I clearly saw the picture that Baxter had been painting in Manifold, I was both devastated and amazed. Perhaps the reason this story is so powerful his science (aside from the genetic engineering) is impeccably rooted in the various fields of science to which he appeals. A couple of the ideas in the book have been combined improperly, but they weren't critical to the story's message. Then again, we have to remember that this science fiction, albeit science fiction at it's very best. The story that Baxter successfully conveys has direct relevance to the title of the book: Manifold Time. And once you find out what that is, you will want to thank the author for taking science and making it human.

After taking time out to write some books about woolly mammoths, Baxter is back where he belongs, right on the cutting edge of hard SF.

The book begins with an irrefutable numbers game that uses probability to show we are all doomed to extinction within 200 years. The hero Reid Malenfant sets out to beat the odds and secure mankind's future.

Baxter has a very visual style of writing. With just a few phrases, he seems to conjure up images that unroll in your head like a film. The descriptions of Sheena 5, an enhanced spaceship piloting squid, and the massive time jumps where the characters witness the entire history of the universe, are exceptional.

The fast pacing of the story kept me hooked, I couldn't put this book down. Towards the end, the story gets a little complicated, but a quick re-read of some sections cleared it all up.

My only (tiny) gripe with the story is that for Baxter some of it is familiar ground. A renegade group of people blast into space, society on earth starts to collapse, mankind faces extinction, hero returns at the end. There are shades of TITAN here. However, there are enough new ideas here and the story is different enough to make it a worthwhile read. And only avid readers of Baxter's other work (as I am) would notice small similarities cropping up.

All in all I highly recommend this book. Buy it today.