Time - Hardcover

Baxter, Stephen

3.79

7,688 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002257688 ISBN 13: 9780002257688

Publisher: Voyager, 1999

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In the millennium’s last great sf novel, Stephen Baxter takes us a short step byond Y2K. The year is 2010. We have survived ... so far.

Cornelius Taine of Eschatatology, Inc., mathematical genius, pursues the logic of our very existence to its inescapable end. In just 200 years our species will be wiped out. Taine’s prediction is expressed in the universal language of numbers. It is elegant, sublime, irrefutable. Even evacuation from Earth will not save us from extinction.
Reid Malenfant, entrepreneur, is single-handedly reinventing the US space program as private enterprise. His company, Bootstrap, has Big Dumb Boosters ready to fly from the California desert to mine a near-Earth asteroid for its mineral wealth – piloted by an enhanced squid named Sheena 5. Malenfant’s vision of mankind’s future in space is brutally cut short, but then Taine offers him the ultimate dream of saving the species.
Emma Stoney, Bootstrap’s financial controller and Malenfant’s ex-wife, is dismayed. Emma knows to what extremes Malenfant will go in pursuit of a dream. Taine is certain people of the future will try to communicate with us if there is any way to avoid the catastrophe. So, using a particle accelerator, Malenfant tunes in to Feynman’s Radio – interference in the background radiation of the Big Bang – and there he does indeed discover a message from the future! Soon, in response, Sheena the squid is flying to a different asteroid – Cruithne, Earth’s remote second moon – for very different reasons.
What Sheena 5 discovers on Cruithne is nothing less than a revelation: the secret reason for our existence visible at last beneath the rippled surface of time’s river. Malenfant and Emma find their own lives, and their love, irrevocably bound up with the wider destiny of humanity as the continuing Feynman Radio signals, washing down over us from the future, begin the ultimate transformation of mankind.
TIME
MANIFOLD 1

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Review:

Stephen Baxter, Britain's foremost author of "hard" SF rooted in real physics, is renowned for thinking big. Time begins with a US entrepreneur's deceptively low-key plans to reclaim space and exploit the asteroids, bypassing NASA's bureaucracy and safety regulations. One bizarre cost-cutting measure: the "Big Dumb Booster" pilot is a genetically enhanced, intelligent squid. Then the mission is redirected following a weird mathematical prediction that humanity hasn't long to live, and a "Feynman radio" transmission from the future that highlights a particular asteroid. Here a space-time gateway opens on unimaginably distant futures, stepping far beyond the dying sun of Wells's The Time Machine to visions of a galaxy reshaped by humanity to hoard its energy ... beyond stars, beyond black holes, beyond even mass. And the emerging message, seen most clearly by a new generation of persecuted, ultra-gifted children, is that this seeming triumph--this total exploitation of our universe's possibilities--isn't good enough. A better path awaits, via a cataclysm that dwarfs mere supernova explosions... Baxter pays homage to the transformations of Clarke's Childhood's End (there's also a nod to 2001), but without the mysticism: it's all respectable, if speculative, physics. His final, devastating payoff makes sequels seem impossible. Two are planned. Rousing stuff, on a cosmic scale. --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

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