Tuesday, January 31, 2006
The Century Club (and two more book reviews, too)!
Yes! Yes! According to Blogger, this is the 100th post here at The Bitter Buffalo! Take that skeptics, naysayers, and pessimists!
And a big Thank You to everyone who stops by here to read what's on my mind. I certainly appreciate your company.
Now onto book reviews. I've decided to get the other two hard sci-fi titles out of the way first, so those of you who don't like sci-fi (and email responses to the last reviews indicate that includes most of my regular readers) have something to look forward in coming weeks. Consider this a gift in honor of the 100th post.
So, let's discuss Stephen Baxter's Manifold series, shall we? I read the first two of three, Manifold: Time and Manifold: Space. Manifold: Origin is sitting on my shelf, and will likely remain there for some time, as the first two books have almost completely exhausted my hunger for hard sci-fi.
And by "hard" sci-fi, I mean science fiction that is less about story or character than it is about ideas, specifically scientific ideas. Baxter's ideas are so technical and obtuse as to be almost incomprehensible to a lay person like myself, and his scope so far-reaching it's difficult to really appreciate their fundamental elegance.
Still, if you like that kind of thing, these books are worth a try.
Both novels revolve around the same character, an egotistic space nut billionaire named Reid Malenfant. But both novels presumably take place in slightly alternate universes, because though the timeframe for the beginning of the story is the same, Malenfant's circumstances are completely different.
In Time, Malenfant the industrialist has plans to privately mine an asteroid in an effort to be the first to exploit (and thereby stake a claim to) the nearly limitless resources available in near space. Rather than send humans (which is expensive, you see), he sends genetically modified and specially trained reef squid. You read that correctly -- he puts on a spaceship cephalapods that have developed enough intelligence to operate the spaceship and associated mining machinery.
It is a testament to Baxter's own intelligence and storytelling ability that he pulls the whole squid-spaceship thing off, and manages to do so convincingly. Kudos to him.
Anyway, a mathemetician convinces Malenfant that a catastrophe called "The Carter Event" will in all likelihood occur within 200 years, and in the process end humanity (conceptually, this is pretty cool stuff, and is presented in a most fascinating manner). So, his plans are altered somewhat, at more or less the same time that the squids go all rogue and reveal a quantum portal of some sort on the asteroid and the population of superintelligent autistic children on Earth reaches a critical mass. A few trips through the portal and we're looking at our universe in its waning hours, billions of years from now. Oh! And the autistics build a special rocket to the moon and colonize it, too.
Is that big enough for ya?
Space is even more ambitious in its scope. Portals show up in this one, too, but they are designed to allow interstellar travel. Several humans (including Reid himself, and some neanderthals, and a few others) warp from port to port, allowing them to live for thousands of years and, with the help of an alien robot-like species, follow the development (or devolvement, in some cases) of humankind over vast periods of time. All the while, humans are aware of a war at the fringes of the solar system between a species that has aparently cleansed the universe previously, and the robot-like species that wants to exploit the solar system on a smaller scale.
So many ideas are thrown at the reader in these books, it is honestly difficult to keep track of them all. I have to admit I was not able to -- just two months after finishing them, it is difficult for me to recall many of the scattered themes. The "ideas" are so thematically relevant in Baxter's books, in fact, the characters and their stories wind up being almost an afterthought. Not that it matters much. Characters have a way of becoming insignificant when your story takes place over billions of years.
Still, if you can handle the big stuff, modern sci-fi doesn't offer much better.
Personalized recommendations, as promised:
Mark, Beth, Dave, Pat, Mom: Nope. Look elsewhere.
Jeff: An excellent choice, sir! May I assist you in any other way?
Matt and Bill: Matt, you'd like one or the other, if not both -- I think Time is the most coherent and "fun" to read. Bill, you can forget these two entirely. Thanks for stopping by.
And a big Thank You to everyone who stops by here to read what's on my mind. I certainly appreciate your company.
Now onto book reviews. I've decided to get the other two hard sci-fi titles out of the way first, so those of you who don't like sci-fi (and email responses to the last reviews indicate that includes most of my regular readers) have something to look forward in coming weeks. Consider this a gift in honor of the 100th post.
So, let's discuss Stephen Baxter's Manifold series, shall we? I read the first two of three, Manifold: Time and Manifold: Space. Manifold: Origin is sitting on my shelf, and will likely remain there for some time, as the first two books have almost completely exhausted my hunger for hard sci-fi.
And by "hard" sci-fi, I mean science fiction that is less about story or character than it is about ideas, specifically scientific ideas. Baxter's ideas are so technical and obtuse as to be almost incomprehensible to a lay person like myself, and his scope so far-reaching it's difficult to really appreciate their fundamental elegance.
Still, if you like that kind of thing, these books are worth a try.
Both novels revolve around the same character, an egotistic space nut billionaire named Reid Malenfant. But both novels presumably take place in slightly alternate universes, because though the timeframe for the beginning of the story is the same, Malenfant's circumstances are completely different.
In Time, Malenfant the industrialist has plans to privately mine an asteroid in an effort to be the first to exploit (and thereby stake a claim to) the nearly limitless resources available in near space. Rather than send humans (which is expensive, you see), he sends genetically modified and specially trained reef squid. You read that correctly -- he puts on a spaceship cephalapods that have developed enough intelligence to operate the spaceship and associated mining machinery.
It is a testament to Baxter's own intelligence and storytelling ability that he pulls the whole squid-spaceship thing off, and manages to do so convincingly. Kudos to him.
Anyway, a mathemetician convinces Malenfant that a catastrophe called "The Carter Event" will in all likelihood occur within 200 years, and in the process end humanity (conceptually, this is pretty cool stuff, and is presented in a most fascinating manner). So, his plans are altered somewhat, at more or less the same time that the squids go all rogue and reveal a quantum portal of some sort on the asteroid and the population of superintelligent autistic children on Earth reaches a critical mass. A few trips through the portal and we're looking at our universe in its waning hours, billions of years from now. Oh! And the autistics build a special rocket to the moon and colonize it, too.
Is that big enough for ya?
Space is even more ambitious in its scope. Portals show up in this one, too, but they are designed to allow interstellar travel. Several humans (including Reid himself, and some neanderthals, and a few others) warp from port to port, allowing them to live for thousands of years and, with the help of an alien robot-like species, follow the development (or devolvement, in some cases) of humankind over vast periods of time. All the while, humans are aware of a war at the fringes of the solar system between a species that has aparently cleansed the universe previously, and the robot-like species that wants to exploit the solar system on a smaller scale.
So many ideas are thrown at the reader in these books, it is honestly difficult to keep track of them all. I have to admit I was not able to -- just two months after finishing them, it is difficult for me to recall many of the scattered themes. The "ideas" are so thematically relevant in Baxter's books, in fact, the characters and their stories wind up being almost an afterthought. Not that it matters much. Characters have a way of becoming insignificant when your story takes place over billions of years.
Still, if you can handle the big stuff, modern sci-fi doesn't offer much better.
Personalized recommendations, as promised:
Mark, Beth, Dave, Pat, Mom: Nope. Look elsewhere.
Jeff: An excellent choice, sir! May I assist you in any other way?
Matt and Bill: Matt, you'd like one or the other, if not both -- I think Time is the most coherent and "fun" to read. Bill, you can forget these two entirely. Thanks for stopping by.
posted by Bill Purdy, 11:04 AM