DEEP FUTURE takes you on dazzling ride to the limits of time and space. Along the way Stephen Baxter looks at our place in the universe, considers the possibility that we are in fact alone, and wonders whether that fact gives us the right to inherit everything. He also looks at how we might strive to overcome the limitations of the physical universe and win the deepest future. Stephen Baxter has brought his trademark narrative flair and imaginative brilliance to the latest ideas in physics and cosmology and produced a breathtaking guide to our possible futures.
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Stephen Baxter's popular SF novels describe fantastic journeys into deep time, both past and future, audaciously imagined but rooted in speculations by working scientists. In Deep Future he presents state-of-the-art futurology without the greasepaint and stage props of fiction.
Beginning with a travelogue through a reasonably likely Year 2100, Baxter discusses problems, techniques and limits of futurology, notes that "surprise-free" predictions can be overturned by new, transforming gadgets (the automobile, the Internet), and ponders scenarios of imminent doom. Then he soars off into space and surveys the incredible wealth that awaits in our own solar system, if only we can reach out for it.
Like his mentor Arthur C Clarke, Baxter coins evocative phrases. For example, describing Callisto's impermanent ice-landscapes: "The ancient craters subsided, like great geological sighs..."
Next stop, the stars--with due consideration of the enormous problems of interstellar flight, and the consequences of solving them. Given exponential population growth, will we fill the Galaxy as quickly as we filled Earth? And is there anyone else out there? Baxter deals at length with this compelling issue, which sparked his "Manifold" SF novels: Time, Space and Origin. Onward, then, into the truly deep future and final thoughts on how life might still struggle on when the stars have died, the black holes are used up, and matter itself is old history.
Deep Future is a lively though often chilling tour of possible futures, looking afresh at classic speculations (from Freeman Dyson, Carl Sagan and many others) and updating them for our new millennium. --David Langford --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Stephen Baxter is the pre-eminent SF writer of his generation. Published around the world he has also won major awards in the UK, US, Germany, and Japan. Born in 1957 he has degrees from Cambridge and Southampton. He lives in Northumberland with his wife.
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Einstein was right: the future rushes toward us relentlessly, a minute every minute, without cease or pity. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Einstein was right: the future rushes toward us relentlessly, a minute every minute, without cease or pity. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
With this wonderful book Stephen Baxter opens up the future of the human race for us to read about now. It is not a novel but more like a series of essays on some of his, and others, ideas about the dominant themes and trends in man's future.
Packed with fascinating stuff, there is at least one interesting thing on each page, with sections on potential global life-ending events, the essential need for expansion into space, and the 'deep future' of the title, as well as many more.
The author's intelligence and imagination come across thrillingly and this book does not suffer from the extended mega-physics info dumps that many might find intimidating in his novels.
Basically it is a marvellous read and anyone with the slightest curiousity in the future will lap it up.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Stephen Baxters "Time" has one of the best time-
jumping sequences in recent SF, during which the
hero Reid Malenfant witness the entire future of the universe.
For that reason alone I had to read "Deep Future".
jumping sequences in recent SF, during which the
hero Reid Malenfant witness the entire future of the universe.
For that reason alone I had to read "Deep Future".
It starts with the close future though. I always
enjoy the gadget part of such futurology. And Stephen Baxter present some neat ones.
E.g. the "recording angel" -
that sits on your shoulder and transcribes your meetings, the evolution of your thoughts etc. -
it will of course be a brilliant thing for the authorities -
and the part where individuals are joined together in an "internet of the mind",
to make an extension of our present
selfes, seems rather inevitable.
But, actually I don't think we are presented with that many surprises by Stephen Baxter in the immediate future.
The deep future is that more exciting. Great nations (companies?) should afford something more than welfare programmes (if they want to survive). And surely if the Dinosaurs
had had a spaceprograme they might have been around today.
So Space is of course our destiny.
It might even be, as David Brin has suggested, that humanity is currently being farmed
by "space-friends" for an interstellar future.
But off we go to the very deep future and the heath-death of the universe. Where our very distant descendants will
try to survive there in a "universe in ruins", when the stars are long gone.
Here Stephen Baxters presentation also seem rather inevitable.
But luckily, as always, there is certain magic to Stephen Baxters books!
-Simon
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