Amazon.co.uk 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
On Moonseed:
‘This is this year’s great disaster novel’
Daily Mirror
‘A disaster movie on the page that’s original and inventive’
Daily Express
‘You don’t blow up the planet in the first reel unless you’ve got something really spectacular for the third. And Baxter does… in the end, MOONSEED is a terrific, full-featured apocalypse, with plenty of buttons to push for the techs and lots of lava.’
Locus
‘Gripping, well-researched and intelligent.’
Focus
‘Acutely intelligent… exceptional urgency of thinking’
Washington Post Book World