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Manifold: Time

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Overview

The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews for this product are not available at this time.

Author Information

Bio of Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge and Southampton Universities. Baxter is the acclaimed author of the Manifold novels and Evolution. He is the winner of the British Science Fiction Award, the Locus Award, the John W. Campbell Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Customer Reviews

  • 2 stars out of 5Lots of work for little result.

    Posted September 04, 2009 by GSKearney, Lincoln, NE

    There are some interesting scientific speculations behind this novel, but plot and the characters are hardly worth bothering with. The ending was unsatisfactory. The main thing that I got from the book was that the author must have been being paid by the word. I've read some of his other work and been reasonably impressed, but this is definitely not one of his better efforts. ---gk

Additional Info

Imprint

Ballantine Books

Filesize

1.12 MB

Number of Pages

480

eBook ISBN

9780345475572

Awards

  • Arthur C. Clarke Award

Excerpt from: Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter

Reid Malenfant You know me. And you know I'm a space cadet.

You know I've campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In fact, in the past I've tried to get you to pay for such things. I've bored you with that often enough already, right?

So tonight I want to look a little farther out. Tonight I want to tell you why I care so much about this issue that I devoted my life to it.

The world isn't big enough any more. You don't need me to stand here and tell you that. We could all choke to death, be extinct in a hundred years.

Or we could be on our way to populating the Galaxy.

Yes, the Galaxy. Want me to tell you how?

Turns out it's all a question of economics.

Let's say we set out to the stars. We might use ion rockets, solar sails, gravity assists. It doesn't matter.

We'll probably start as we have in the Solar System, with automated probes. Humans may follow. One percent of the helium-3 fusion fuel available from the planet Uranus, for example, would be enough to send a giant interstellar ark, each ark containing a billion people, to every star in the Galaxy. But it may be cheaper for the probes to manufacture humans in situ, using cell synthesis and artificial womb technology.

The first wave will be slow, no faster than we can afford. It doesn't matter. Not in the long term.

When the probe reaches a new system, it phones home, and starts to build.

Here is the heart of the strategy. A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore anticipate massive exploitation of the system's resources, without restraint, by the probe. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us.

I thought you'd enjoy that line. There's nothing an entre- preneur likes more than the sound of the word free.

More probes will be built and launched from each of the first wave of target stars. The probes will reach new targets; and again, more probes will be spawned, and fired onward. The volume covered by the probes will grow rapidly, like the expansion of gas into a vacuum