Awful. Did get thru this SF sequel to Time, but no story thread other than aliens are colonizing the UNIVERSE, and we are in their way. Pessimistic and huge leaps in plausibility in a so-called ?hard? science fiction story.

Odd book, a kind of strange jingoistic US-centricism (for a British author!)
Interesting ideas, but the characters were mainly ciphers. ( )

This side-quel to Manifold:Time did not work for me at all. The same main character, Reid Malenfant, is the core of the book, but in this parallel universe, his life has worked out very differently. To orient readers, at least those familiar with SF, one of the primary characters from the first book, his wife, is almost immediately revealed to have died of cancer, a tumor triggered by a random accident of cosmic rays. But more than local history has changed. While the mysterious interstellar gates still exist, now Fermi's Paradox is the primary theme. At first, it's where are they, but it quickly becomes "they're here, and more are coming, and it's not a good thing." The primary idea Baxter wants to play with is that in a universe this large, no matter how large it is, sooner or later, something will survive to wipe everything else out. But there's more layers to that idea than that. As Reid and several women (who dominate most of this arcs in this book) travel the light years by gate, there's no escaping the time differential. Hundreds and thousands of years pass in the history of our solar system, in Stapledonian fashion. Unfortunately, several things work against the book. The theme means that for the most part everyone is a helpless observer of solar and galactic events beyond anyone's control. The small "cast" means that despite a temporal and spatial canvas that boggles the imagination, people still run into each other more easily than I can find friends in small town. The book ends with two events, both of which seemed at odds with the "universe really doesn't care about Earth and humans, you know" theme that was the crux of the preceding 500 pages. ( )

Another excellent story from Baxter. 2nd volume of Manifold series. ( )

Really quite stunning. I liked Manifold: Time but found it occasionally uneven and that it didn't entirely fit together. But this book was a lot better (and I recommend starting with it, there's no sense in which this is a sequel).

Manifold: Space is an exploration of the Fermi Paradox -- why we don't see life elsewhere in the universe. And the answers it gives are quite chilling but ultimately hopeful. It is as much about evolution as physics as it explores the adaptations of humans living everywhere from Mercury to Triton -- not to mention the other non-carbon based life forms the star travellers find throughout the universe, in many cases dead or dying from violent expansionary cultures and ultimately recurrent physical phenomenon themselves. ( )