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| Rating |  |
| Type | Kindle Edition |
| Release Date | 2003-12-16 |
| List Price | $7.99 |
| Price | Item currently not available |
Categories |
| Literature & Fiction Baxter, Stephen Space Opera Kindle Books |
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Description |
| The year is 2010. Extra than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological extension, 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. This man, Reid Malenfant, has a very different answer 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? |
| Go away it to the consistently clever Stephen Baxter to pull the old bait and switch. A story this begins as a hoary asteroid-mining tale, set in 2010 against the by-now familiar spiel of fulfilling humanity's pan-galactic Manifest Destiny, instead takes a bold, delightful ascent into a trajectory far extra ambitious. To ensure its survival, humankind want not merely master the galaxy but in addition the flow of time itself. 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 together with his ready-to-fly Big Dumb Booster, piloted by a genetically increased super-squid. But Malenfant's near-term plans to exploit the asteroids get diverted when he crosses paths together with creepy mathematician and eschatologist Cornelius Taine. Applying Bayes's theorem and a series of other statistical do-si-dos, Taine convinces Malenfant this an inescapable extinction event--the "Carter catastrophe"--is nigh, and this even working to colonize the galaxy might not be enough to save humanity. The answer: build a Feynman "radio" to pay attention to the future and, by detecting coded quantum waves traveling back throughout time, divine the fate of human "downstreamers" and locate the key to their survival. Space flight, time journey, and even squid negotiations ensue, while Earth is gripped in Last Days madness. One time again, the prize-spangled Baxter provides us sci-fi at its beard-stroking excellent, together with an imaginative, audacious plot line this's firmly grounded in good technology, reminiscent of Baxter's own outstanding Vacuum Diagrams. --Paul Hughes |
Customer Reviews |
 Profound Ideas 2010-03-17 |
| By Joel B |
Baxter's 'Manifold Time' focuses on some truly profound ideas and mind-boggling time scales. Very deep.
Yes, the dialogue, plot, and characters are at times a bit thin. Overall the plot and writerly craft pick up during the second half. But the point of 'Manifold Time' is the science and the ideas, and sublime ideas they are. If you are just looking for a dumb, cheap thriller, this is not for you. But anyone who appreciates Carl Sagan or Michio Kaku and the accompanying deep thoughts of astrophysics and the universe should appreciate this book. |
 wasted potential 2010-01-30 |
| By DickyJoe (Long Beach, CA USA) |
| The beginning of the book was quite engrossing, but the plot kept wandering all over the place. When the story suddenly, and unexpectedly, started talking about some super-intelligent squid, I quit. Any interest I had in continuing the book was gone. |
| A Physics Fairy Tale - Undisciplined Writing - Cheesy 2010-01-28 |
| By Arnold J. Barzydlo (Lincoln, NE USA) |
| The characters were weak, but so was the story line. Too many times I had to suspend my understanding of physics to let the author plod to the next impossible description. For example, the author seems to think that reflected light travels at infinite velocity (or very much faster than c) whereas the light coming directly at you from the event is traveling at c. (Characters are watching an expanding sphere of light from an explosion, waiting for it to hit them.) The book has many such flaws. And the characters are equally flawed and thinly portrayed. I can't recommend this book to anyone expecting hard SF, unless you want to groan a lot. |
| I Got Bogged Down... 2009-12-28 |
| By Ian Martin (Belmont, CA USA) |
I am a fan of Stephen Baxter's. Vacuum Diagrams and The Time Ships were two of my favorite sci-fi books in the last ten years (at least among the Sci Fi I have read.) And I was looking forward to diving into a meaty trilogy of his that we could me reading for awhile. However whereas those two novel's took some fascinating contemporary science and built interesting conflicts and narratives on top of them, this book drowns beneath them.
Too often the action gets bogged down in a scene where one scientist or mathematician is standing in a room with one of the protagonists (who were neither) explaining some scientific principle or another which Baxter feels in imperative to the story. And just as the protagonists through one cliche or another express their confusion ("In English" - "X...tried to act like they understood." - "Malenfant tried to contain his frustrating confusion.") over and over and over again, so too was I squinting at the page and struggling to distill the important principles. Invariably the scientist or mathematician would sigh in patronizing frustration at the protagonist/me and simplify things...which they could have just done to begin with.
This happens over and over again to the point where I just got bored and ended up getting bogged down in this one for quite awhile. It's a pity because this past weekend I finally made a concerted effort to finish it and, where the first 250 pages were like a pushup drill, the last 150 were a lot of fun and I flew through them. In typical Baxter style, the story was elevated from interesting straightforward premises to questions about the very nature of the universe and what could be our place in it's present, beginning, and ultimate end. Even in the midst of the climax there was STILL that convention of the smart characters stopping to explain what was happening to the dullards in the story, but at that point the action had reached a level that I didn't care.
Even though I found this one excruciating at points I'm surprisingly still interested in the sequels, if only because I have no idea how this one could carry on. If you can soldier through the first half this one gets a hesitant recommendation. |
 confuses scale with depth 2009-12-26 |
| By Christopher Watson (Washington, DC) |
| much less than compelling characters. the truths described in the book make little sense and have other easier explanations. in short. big ideas but trite. |
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