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
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more

On Time - Jim Al-Khalili *****

By a small margin Jim Al-Khalili's The World According to Physics is my favourite of his books, both because the 'three pillars' concept at its heart works so well - but also because it's short. On Time is somewhat heavier, but thankfully not a wrist-buster. It might seem at first sight odd that a book on a subset of physics is considerably longer than one covering the whole thing, but time is one of those subjects that inevitably involves considerable complexities and needs depth. As Al-Khalili establishes, it's hard to think of any other scientific concept where our perception of it - what he refers to as manifest time or psychological time - is so different from the view from physics. Some physicists go so far as to suggest that time doesn't exist at all. In the book, Al-Khalili sets out (to my mind quite successfully) both to explain why they think this is the case, but also why it's not the best interpretation of time. I'd certainly note that I...
Post a Comment
Read more