Manifold: time

Reid Malenfant has a plan to go to the stars, and it's very Musk-like even before Musk was a thing. OK fine. Most of the first 12% of this book (which is where I pressed the eject button) is taken up by a sophist discussion of the chances of human survival. So here's the argument: either human population grows exponentially/polynomially, it levels off at a sustainable level, or it crashes. Following so far? The fact that you are alive means that the most likely outcome is the third. Here's the logic: In the first two scenarios, the vast majority of all humans will live in the future. So if you picked someone (you) randomly, you'd most likely be in the far future! Because you are here, the most likely outcome is that humans die off soon. In the story, within 240 years at the most.

First of all, this is not a plot. Or characters. Or poetic language. Or description. Or ... any of a hundred other things that would be interesting. This is someone smoking too much pot and explaining their pot-infused philosophy to you. If an author wants to set up a coming apocalypse there's so many better ways to do it than this "clever" thought experiment.

Second of all, this therefore means that if humanity does survive into the far future, they have sent a message back in time to us with instructions on how to survive. That whole sophistry just sets up Reid Malenfant's purpose to be to look for the message from the future. This whole first part of the book is just to set that up. That makes no sense and I had to read it all for that reason? Give me a break!

At this point I searched for reviews of the book to see if anyone said the later parts of the book are worth it. And the top review of Manifold: Time that Google referred me to is one from Kirkus. It's fairly spoilery, so if the above BS is actually intriguing to you, don't click the review. Anyway, I've no interest in reading the schmoz that's described there.

DNF at 12%.

First, a few 'random' observations:
I was so disappointed that the enhanced squid didn't turn out to be the dominant species in the Manifold at the end, especially after the teaser when Baxter wrote that they were inherently better fitted for space travel than humans. But he even wrote "Humans are the most important sentient creatures who have ever existed, or will ever exist", just to take away any hope I might have that it was going to come. What a missed opportunity, it would have been so much more interesting that way.

"His elaborate [South African] accent, forever linked to a nightmare past, made her skin prickle." The book was written in 1999. At that time, the accent indeed made me cringe, but encouragingly, it is not 'forever', it is now not a problem.

"This has been a good place to cycle,” Anna said dreamily. “Of course that’s why we built it this way.”
“You built a toy universe so you could ride your bikes?”
She grinned at Emma. “If you were ten years old and could build a universe, what would you do?”"
Nice thought, but why ever would Stephen Baxter think that having fun riding bikes is only for children?!

"Suppose you have a lily, doubling in size every day. In thirty days it will cover the pond. Right now it looks harmless. You might think you need to act when it covers half the pond. But when will that be? On the twenty-ninth day."
Who would have thought that with the pandemic, we would all have heard such illustrations of just what exponential growth means multiple times?!

The book is a bit of a mixed bag. Some of the "real" (according to the acknowledgments) science is rather dubious. For instance, the probability argument makes no real sense, especially to anyone who knows the first thing about population dynamics. The section on flitting between parallel universes is boring. But in general, it was a great story, enjoyable reading and not too dated.

To cut to the chase, I didn't care for this book much at all. I've never read a sci-fi book so heavy on science, by which I mean he spent a LOT of time explaining various scientific principles. There were LONG passages where various ideas and theories are discussed, explained, etc, so much so that, for me, it killed the flow of the story. I like science, and I like novels. For me, this was NOT a good mix. Tell me what's going on, not why. I don't care, in the context of a novel, about Relativity, quantum theory, etc. Just tell about that darn space ships! :P

Another issue I had with this book, which may or may not carry as much weight with others, was that if the author needed a bad guy, it was probably some crazy Christian. I get that people don't accept Christianity as I do. Though I think the'yre wrong, obviously, I'm not going beat them with a buckler and force them to convert. By the same token, I'd rather not spend countless hours reading what I had hoped to be a fun sci-fi novel, only to see it make baseless caricatures of my faith. Call me petty if you will, but that part of the story was impossible for me to ignore.

I finished the book, but I don't think I'll be reading any more in the series.