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January 24, 2008
Origin - Stephen Baxter
Book 3 of my 52 books for 2008
The third in the Manifold series, ostensibly the last, but I fear Baxter has not tidied up half the plot holes he created, and have a bad feeling he never will. In fact, there are a few new ones.
In this outing, Melenfant is back, and Emma Stoney, and Nemoto and a few of the secondary characters from the previous two volumes - "Space", and "Time" reappear also.
Baxter's astonishing trick is to have exactly the same people in each book, in largely similar but parallel universes. In each universe, Malenfant is an aging astronaut in the early 21st century, trying to get NASA to to send him to the stars. There are large differences between these universes however, and in this way Baxter explores different solutions to one of our most intriguing cosmological questions - Fermi's Paradox. Fermi asked the question - if there is life on other planets, why haven't they come here already? The universe has had billions of years for life to develop, and even at relativistic speeds there is plenty of time for us to have been visited, or contacted, by aliens. So where are they?
In Origin, two connected events change the world completely in an instant. One is that the Earth's moon disappears and is replaced by a larger red moon. This causes massive disruption to the ocean tides, and widespread loss of land and life. A smaller anomaly but no less significant is that a blue circle appears in the sky over Africa for a few minutes. Malenfant's wife Emma and some others fall into it and strange hominid creatures fall out.
Malenfant believes that Emma has been transported to the red moon by this blue circle and launches a mission, helped by Nemoto, to find her.
I loved the alternate universe theories, and the descriptions of how the universe might evolve, and why life developed on Earth, but we haven't seen it any elsewhere. I wished that Baxter would give us come conclusions, but the plot becomes more and more complex, and never does to my satisfaction. It is interesting in this area however.
But I did not love this book. The author took extreme liberties with his loyal readers, and veered into some very weird, violent and unpleasant anthopological episodes. There were hundreds of pages of unrelenting miserableness, where character's lives were torn apart, they were frequently raped and tortured and many murdered and even eaten. This served very little purpose except to show off how clever the author is in imagining new societies. It didn't advance the science fictional elements of the plot, it was shocking, gratuitous, just plain unnecessary. Readers following on from books one and two would not be expecting this, and it is unfair to change the feel of the series in this way without warning.
A disappointing 'conclusion' then, I hoped for much more. Am I mascosistic enough to persevere with the short story collection "Phase Space" set in the same multiverse? Probably.
A very slight spoiler, but my advice, unless you are a completist like me and must read every word, is to only follow the human, and higher human characters' stories, and completely ignore those of the lesser hominids. It's easy to do this, as their sections are prefaced by their names (Fire, Shadow etc). You'll save yourself some time, and get just the real SF, which is the only interesting bit anyway.
Posted by se71 at January 24, 2008 09:57 AM
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