Time - Stephen Baxter

Time has been sitting on my bookshelf since the day it was published in 1999. Over the years I've collected the rest of the Manifold Sequence and they too have gathered dust. Every time I thought about starting on Time I'd talk myself out of it. Baxter has a reputation as the hardest of Hard SF writers and I usually just want something simple and fun to read before drifting off each evening. What I always forget is that, regardless of how 'hard' Baxter is, he is always very readable. So I started the book and quickly became so engrossed I was staying up late just to read one more section...and then another. That horrible cliche - of not being able to put it down - became a truth.

Baxter's most impressive talent is his ability to take the reader on a journey through time and space that encompasses years and distances that are almost unimaginable. The story begins in the year 2010 on Earth but extends trillions of years into the future and out to the farthest regions of space and through a multitude of universes. Baxter's self-confidence in writing about such grandiose elements permits the reader to be swept along for the ride. All of this is done with a minimum of difficult detail - Time isn't really a Hard SF novel after all. There's lots of science but for the most part it deals with such esoteric and hypothetical situations that it might as well be fantasy. The artefact, found on a near-Earth asteroid, that allows travel through time and space, is in essence a 'magic gate'.

I don't think Baxter gets all of his story right. In particular, the way he portrays humanity's response to the Carter Catastrophe and the images from the Deep Future just don't ring true for me. Perhaps I just have a more optimistic opinion of mankind's ability to deal with monumental crises. One of the most common complaints about Baxter's works is that his characters aren't multi-dimensional beings - each is a cypher that represents a single viewpoint. This is still true in Time. The three main characters - Reid Malefant, Emma Stoney and Cornelius Taine - don't behave in rational ways and they certainly don't seem to be entirely human in their motivations. Strangely - and interestingly - the exception to this one-dimensionality is the politician Maura Della. She is the only character that even slightly reflects on the moral dilemmas she encounters.

This is Big Picture science fiction and the little people don't matter. Lives are taken. Morality is up-turned. Science is destroyed. Cosmology is reinvented. Humanity fights and loses. And wins. It takes enormous talent to right about these sorts of concepts and to make that writing enjoyable. I'll be starting on Space, the first sequel to Time, fairly soon. I want to know what happens next - and that surely is the best recommendation a book can be given.