Deep Future [Hardcover]

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

Beginning with an in-depth look at what the 21st century might bring in the way of technological advances and an examination of our past efforts to gain the future (the Apollo programme and the Space Shuttle) DEEP FUTURE takes you on a dizzying ride to the limits of time and space and looks at how mankind might overcome the unavoidable limitations of a physical universe and win the deep future. Only a writer as imaginatively gifted as Stephen Baxter could present a future history of mankind that incorporates space-faring genetically modified squid and the mining of black holes. DEEP FUTURE is a vivid travelogue of both the distant future and the far reaches of a solar system we must colonise and a galaxy we simply must inherit in order to survive. The logic of a vast universe in which we seem to be alone could be grim but in Baxter's hands the deep future is our only possible refuge. Even the chapter which charts how nature will leave us behind if we fail is a beautifully atmospheric cautionary tale.

Stephen Baxter has become one of the SF genre's key figures. Novels such as The Time Ships and Voyage have won awards and been published everywhere from Japan, to Holland, to Finland and the US.