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

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more