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The Thousand Earths (SF) - Stephen Baxter ****

This is a massive book, both in scope and just as a 586 page physical doorstop. Stephen Baxter repeatedly switches between two apparently unconnected storylines - one featuring John Hackett, an adventurer who has a desire to make immense journeys in time and space, and the other a family on one of the titular thousand Earths as they live through the last 30 years of the existence of their world. It's only towards the end of the book that the connection between the two threads is revealed.

Each of the storylines has enough original ideas in it to be a novel in its own right. The John Hackett thread starts with a round trip to the Andromeda galaxy, which, due to relativistic time dilation effects, means he returns to Earth after 5 million years are elapsed. Apart from a rather neat SF idea for the way such a ship could work, the main content of this storyline is about the way that humanity might change if it survives long into the future. Hackett goes on to make more trips, travelling vastly further into the future, encountering some surprising ideas of future societies.

The other storyline has a very different timescale. Mela and her family live on one of a set of a thousand space habitats that seem to be science fiction equivalents of the Discworld, though supported by technology, rather than magic and turtles. However, there is something wrong with their habitat, which has been gradually disappearing as the perimeter of the land shrinks more and more. The people know that their world will have entirely disappeared in 30 years - with a gradually growing displacement of refugees.

I have to admire Baxter for the sheer scale of these stories. And mostly I enjoyed them - but I did find a couple of things slightly irritating. One is the way the storyline kept switching. Once I got engrossed in one, I wanted to continue it, not flip-flop between the two. I'd rather have had longer segments and fewer switches. Of the two storylines, I initially much preferred the John Hackett one, as the Mela story starts very slowly and is a touch dull until we get down to the last few years.

My other doubt was not only that humanity could continue as long as Baxter suggests, but also that it would do so with only trivial genetic changes and with a continuity of history over many millions of years. There is one technological MacGuffin to provide some aspects of that continuity, but even so, given the huge changes that have happened in the 200,000 years since Homo sapiens originated, it somehow seems unlikely that humans will be pretty much the same in the far distant future.

Despite these niggles, though, my general response is still to be sincerely impressed with a novel that does make the reader think about the future of the human race and its implications.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email for free here

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