Skip to main content

World Engines: Destroyer (SF) - Stephen Baxter ****

Stephen Baxter is an old school, hard SF author. World Engines: Destroyer is a page-turner, with the fiction is built around as much solid science as possible. Baxter includes five pages of afterword, describing the scientific discoveries and theories he incorporates. The central conceit - of multiple versions of reality that can be traversed - may be a fair distance from science, but following firmly in the tradition of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, once he builds in his fantastical item, Baxter is able to take his science and construct something around it on an impressive scale.

The main character, Reid Malenfant (a clumsy name, which the book gives an obscure explanation for, but surely must really be 'Badchild' (as opposed to, say, Fairchild)) dies in 2019 in a space accident, 14 years after his wife Emma Stoney is lost on a mission to Phobos, one of the Martian moons. He is restored from deep freeze to discover that it is 2469 - and he has been brought back because Earth is receiving messages claiming to be from Emma Stoney and asking Malenfant to come for her.

Baxter does a brilliant job of describing a civilisation 450 years in the future, which has just the right balance of difference and familiarity. The England he describes is radically transformed, in part due to drastic sea level rise from climate change. But this is only the start of an adventure that takes Malenfant and other characters far out into the solar system to encounter some brilliantly engineered surprises, starting with a shock on the subject of Neil Armstrong. There is no doubt that Baxter is a worthy successor to Asimov and Clarke -  the underlying concepts are chunky and impressive, with a huge potential for going further than is possible in a single novel. There's an awful lot brought into this book - but the reader is never left behind, and Baxter is prepared to give us some impressive detail of the science.

The only reason the book doesn't get five stars is that Baxter follows those classic authors Asimov and Clarke in one other trait - his characters are dependably two-dimensional. To take two examples from the future England, we have Deirdra, a 17-year-old who is in a constant state of amazement and delight, and Prefect Morrel, whose only emotional state seems to be outrage. Malenfant himself, a decidedly ageing action hero at around age 60, does come up with some entertaining pop culture references, but again has very little depth. In fact, echoing Asimov's R. Daneel Olivaw, the character that is most rounded here is a robot/android.

However, just as it's possible to forgive Asimov, so it is Baxter - this is an excellent book with brilliant ideas, despite the lack of character depth and distinction. I don't know if Baxter intends to take the story with these versions of the characters further (Malenfant and Stoney also appear in his Manifold series from about 20 years ago, but not the same versions of them) - but I really hope he does so, as I'd love to know what happens next.
Hardback 

Kindle 
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin Five Way Interview

Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (born in 1999) is a distinguished composer, concert pianist, music theorist and researcher. Three of his piano CDs have been released in Germany. He started his undergraduate degree at the age of 13 in Kazakhstan, and having completed three musical doctorates in prominent Italian music institutions at the age of 20, he has mastered advanced composition techniques. In 2024 he completed a PhD in music at the University of St Andrews / Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (researching timbre-texture co-ordinate in avant- garde music), and was awarded The Silver Medal of The Worshipful Company of Musicians, London. He has held visiting affiliations at the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge and UCL, and has been lecturing and giving talks internationally since the age of 13. His latest book is Quantum Mechanics and Avant Garde Music . What links quantum physics and avant-garde music? The entire book is devoted to this question. To put it briefly, there are many different link...

The Bright Side - Sumit Paul-Choudhury ***

When I first saw The Bright Side (the subtitle doesn't help), I was worried it was a self-help manual, a format that rarely contains good science. In reality, Sumit Paul-Choudhury does not give us a checklist for becoming an optimist or anything similar - and there is a fair amount of science content. But to be honest, I didn't get on very well with this book. What Paul-Choudhury sets out to do is to both identify what optimism is and to assess its place in a world where we are beset with big problems such as climate change (which he goes into in some detail) that some activists position as an existential threat. This is all done in a friendly, approachable fashion. In that sense it's a classic pop-psychology title. For me, Paul-Choudhury certainly has it right about the lack of logic of extreme doom-mongers, such as Extinction Rebellion and teenage climate protestors, and his assessment of the nature of optimism seems very reasonable, if presented at a fairly overview leve...

Everything is Predictable - Tom Chivers *****

There's a stereotype of computer users: Mac users are creative and cool, while PC users are businesslike and unimaginative. Less well-known is that the world of statistics has an equivalent division. Bayesians are the Mac users of the stats world, where frequentists are the PC people. This book sets out to show why Bayesians are not just cool, but also mostly right. Tom Chivers does an excellent job of giving us some historical background, then dives into two key aspects of the use of statistics. These are in science, where the standard approach is frequentist and Bayes only creeps into a few specific applications, such as the accuracy of medical tests, and in decision theory where Bayes is dominant. If this all sounds very dry and unexciting, it's quite the reverse. I admit, I love probability and statistics, and I am something of a closet Bayesian*), but Chivers' light and entertaining style means that what could have been the mathematical equivalent of debating angels on...