Astounding vision (Space - Stephen Baxter)

Member Name: amonet

Product:	Space - Stephen Baxter
Date:	20/10/01 (124 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: easy to read, long!, original ideas

Disadvantages: not long enough, science may put you off

This is a sci-fi book, an extreme one at that. I'm not a scientist so I won't even attempt to tell you about the scientific theories and information in this book.

Suffice to say, that if astrophysics is your thing, this book will have you purring with contentment. I basically understood the science - in the first half anyway. Most of it is familiar and well enough described that you understand what the author is trying to say even if the theory is way over your head. Propulsion systems and relativity (over and above your basic E=MC 2 business) are a good example. You don't NEED to understand every word - it will help if you do but glossing over pages of it won't hurt the flow of the novel.

The basic premise is contact with alien species and evolution. The contact with alien species in this book is novel and original, plus far more realistic than I've read before. In your Star Treks and Star Wars, most species tend to have a common point of interest; some basis for way of life that allows contact and interaction in a meaningful way.

Stephen Baxter's first lot of aliens are so entirely different from us that it takes a great deal of time to get them to even notice humans, let alone interact with them.

Reid Malenfant is party to the discovery of aliens in our solar system, along with the original discoverer of said aliens, Nemoto. To cut a very long and interesting story short, Malenfant makes contact with the aliens and goes off on a relativistic and millennia-long journey with them, wandering around the universe. They are not like us. They don't understand the concepts of ideas and religion. Reid tries to help them understand. Their obvious need to understand said concepts make him wonder - why does a machine-based society really want to know about this stuff? Is it a product of their sentient evolution or is there something they aren't telling him?

Nemoto somehow manages to live for a very
long time indeed and exists through a thousand years of human history, pre and post Contact. She's a funny, stroppy, secretive little Japanese woman with apparently abundant financial resources. She has such long term vision that once you've finished the book, you realise that she knew what was going on all along - and planned for it.

Another group of aliens also exists in Baxter's universe. Sadly they aren't as benevolent as Nemoto's little machine race. They are moving along the arm of the Milky Way in which we live at a rate of knots, voraciously consuming every natural resource in their path. And they will be arriving at Earth very soon.

The crux of this book is evolution. Here's where it got interesting for me and introduced me to concepts of time that I had absolutely never considered before. I can't give too much away as the conclusion of the book is bound up with evolution and the existence and extinction of life. I will whet your appetite by telling you this: every 800 million years something happens in the universe that wipes out all life everywhere. THIS is why no life form has long enough to evolve into not just a galaxy-faring Star Trek type race. THIS is why we don't see more aliens flying around the skies.

And THIS is what the machine aliens need help with. Reid Malenfant ends up one of the last humans alive, working with alien species at the centre of our galaxy in an attempt to fight the inevitable. The mindblowing concept here is that it's too late to stop the next universal extinction. He's working on the next extinction but one ...

You won't be able to put this book down. If you have trouble with science, read it anyway - try to make sense of the science if you so desire, but don't make so much effort that it spoils the story for you. I love books that make me think, especially books that make me think of new thought patterns and ideas, books that challenge curr
ent ways of thinking and books that make you realise how clever life is.

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