Time (Voyager) [Hardcover]

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

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

In the millennium’s last great sf novel, Stephen Baxter takes us a short step byond Y2K. The year is 2010. We have survived … so far.

Cornelius Taine of Eschatatology, Inc., mathematical genius, pursues the logic of our very existence to its inescapable end. In just 200 years our species will be wiped out. Taine’s prediction is expressed in the universal language of numbers. It is elegant, sublime, irrefutable. Even evacuation from Earth will not save us from extinction.
Reid Malenfant, entrepreneur, is single-handedly reinventing the US space program as private enterprise. His company, Bootstrap, has Big Dumb Boosters ready to fly from the California desert to mine a near-Earth asteroid for its mineral wealth – piloted by an enhanced squid named Sheena 5. Malenfant’s vision of mankind’s future in space is brutally cut short, but then Taine offers him the ultimate dream of saving the species.
Emma Stoney, Bootstrap’s financial controller and Malenfant’s ex-wife, is dismayed. Emma knows to what extremes Malenfant will go in pursuit of a dream. Taine is certain people of the future will try to communicate with us if there is any way to avoid the catastrophe. So, using a particle accelerator, Malenfant tunes in to Feynman’s Radio – interference in the background radiation of the Big Bang – and there he does indeed discover a message from the future! Soon, in response, Sheena the squid is flying to a different asteroid – Cruithne, Earth’s remote second moon – for very different reasons.
What Sheena 5 discovers on Cruithne is nothing less than a revelation: the secret reason for our existence visible at last beneath the rippled surface of time’s river. Malenfant and Emma find their own lives, and their love, irrevocably bound up with the wider destiny of humanity as the continuing Feynman Radio signals, washing down over us from the future, begin the ultimate transformation of mankind.
TIME
MANIFOLD 1

In the millennium’s last great sf novel. Stephen Baxter takes us a short step beyond Y2K. The year is 2010. We have survived … so far.

DEAD RECKONING
'Cornelius Taine' of Eschatology, Inc., mathematical genius, pursues the logic of our very existence to its inescapable end. In just 200 years our species will be wiped out. Taine’s prediction is expressed in the universal language of numbers. It is elegant, sublime, irrefutable. Even evacuation from Earth will not save us from extinction.

BOOTSTRAP
'Reid Malenfant', entrepreneur, is singlehandedly reinventingthe US space program as private enterprise. His company, Bootstrap, has Big Dumb Boosters ready to fly from the California desert to mine a near-Earth asteroid for its mineral wealth – piloted by an enhanced squid named Sheena 5. Malenfant’s vision of mankind’s future in space is brutally cut short, but then Taine offers him the ultimate dream of saving the species.

THE FEYNMAN RADIO
'Emma Stoney', Bootstrap’s financial controller and Malenfant’s ex-wife, is dismayed. Emma knows to what extremes Malenfant will go in pursuit of a dream. Taine is certain people of the future will try to communicate with us if there is any way to avoid the catastrophe. So, using a particle accelerator, Malenfant tunes in to Feynman Radio signals- interference in the background radiation of the Big Bang. He does indeed discover a message from the future! Soon, in response, Sheena the squid is flying to a different asteroid – Cruithne, Earth’s remote second moon – for very different reasons.

TIME
'What Sheena 5 'discovers on Cruithne is nothing less than a revelation: the secret reason for our existence visible at last beneath the rippled surface of time’s river. Malenfant and Emma find their own lives, and their love, irrevocably bound up with the wider destiny of humanity as the continuing Feynman Radio signals, washing down over us from the future, begin the ultimate transformation of mankind.

PRAISE FOR 'MOONSEED'

“This year’s great disaster novel”
DAILY MIRROR

“Baxter offers Technicolor wide-screen catastrophe”
DAILY TELEGRAPH

“A disaster movie on the page that’s inventive and original”
SUNDAY 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 … 'Moonseed'is a terrific, full-featured apocalypse, with plenty of buttons to push for the techs and lots of lava”
LOCUS

“'Moonseed' is a fine book, a gripping read, well researched and intelligent”
FOCUS

“ A suspenseful, high-tech, hard science fiction adventure from one of the best in science fiction”
SCIENCE FICTION CHRONICLE

“Baxter is an acutely intelligent man, and his stories are driven by quite exceptional urgency of thinking”
WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

The author applied to become an astronaut in 1991. He didn’t make it, but achieved the next best thing by becoming a science fiction writer, and his novels and short stories have been published and have won awards around the world. His science background is in maths and engineering. He is married and lives in Buckinghamshire.