Origin - Softcover

Baxter, Stephen

3.7

3,225 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006511848 ISBN 13: 9780006511847

Publisher: Harper Voyager, 2011

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Concluding the epic Manifold series that began with TIME and continued with SPACE: the adventures of the maverick astronaut Reid Malenfant bring him at last to the beginning of everything.

NASA astronaut Reid Malenfant is flying a military jet over Africa when a vast electric-blue circle appears in the air – and the Red Moon dramatically replaces our ancient, cherished moon. Malenfant's plane is destroyed as he chases the alien circle of light.

Though Malenfant survives, his wife Emma is swept up and hurled towards the Red Moon. Through the months of floods and earthquakes that follow Malenfant singlemindedly lobbies for a moonshot to rescue her.

He's heading for the Red Moon where time and space converge, the origin of the manifold.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Stephen Baxter continues to think big and create SF on a grand cosmic scale in Origin, the third novel of his Manifold trilogy.

The Manifold is an infinite sheaf of alternative universes which Baxter explores in terms of Fermi's Paradox. There's no reason why humanity should be unique; logically there should be alien races, some long enough established to have made their mark on the galaxy; where are they?

Book one, Time, offered a vision of lonely humanity extending to the far end of eternity and finally rebooting a "better" universe. Space showed the consequences of teeming interstellar life, a cruel struggle for resources, punctuated by galactic-sized extinction events. Now Origin confronts the whole Manifold and its and humanity's manipulation by enigmatic "Old Ones".

Astronaut Reid Malenfant (versions of whom starred in Time and Space) again encounters advanced technology as a huge, glowing blue circle--a portal to and from the Red Moon that wanders between universes and has just replaced our own moon. It's habitable and populated by an extraordinary medley from all stages of human evolution, scooped up from different Earths. There's much conflict with primitives leading nasty, brutish and short lives... plus super-evolved humans who debate whether we are truly sentient.

At its core the Red Moon contains the failing World Engine which flips between universes. Also down there is the secret history of this multi-verse, right back to the cataclysmic branch-point from which the Manifold flowered. Who are the Old Ones? "They made the manifold"--but were maybe not so different from us and rash, quixotic Malenfant after all. Highly superior SF, guaranteed to jolt one's sense of wonder. --David Langford

Review:

‘The most important living science-fiction writer in the country’
THE TIMES

‘The best SF writer in Britain’
SFX

Praise for The Manifold Trilogy:

‘Pacy, visionary, extravagantly imagined, TIME places Baxter firmly in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov’
THE TIMES

‘Highly intelligent, with original ideas in almost every sentence’
THE GUARDIAN

‘Baxter is taking basic SF ideas and rebuilding them based on current science, technology and politics ... [He] apparently has the ambition and the energy to reinvigorate hard SF all by himself’
LOCUS

‘It’s time for Baxter to take his place alongside Asimov and Heinlein’
EDGE

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.