- Baxter, Stephen.
Manifold: Time.
New York: Del Rey, 2000.
ISBN 978-0-345-43076-2.
-
One claim frequently made by detractors of “hard”
(scientifically realistic) science fiction is that the technical
details crowd out character development and plot. While this
may be the case for some exemplars of the genre, this magnificent
novel, diamondoid in its science, is as compelling a page-turner
as any thriller I've read in years, and is populated with characters
who are simultaneously several sigma eccentric yet believable,
who discover profound truths about themselves and each other
as the story progresses. How hard the science? Well, this is a
story in which
quantum gravity,
closed timelike curves,
the transactional
interpretation of quantum mechanics,
strange matter,
the bizarre asteroid 3753 Cruithne,
cosmological natural selection,
the doomsday argument,
Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory,
entrepreneurial asteroid mining,
vacuum decay,
the long-term prospects
for intelligent life in an expanding universe,
and sentient, genetically-modified cephalopods
all play a part, with the underlying science pretty much correct, at least
as far as we understand these sometimes murky areas.
The novel, which was originally published in 2000, takes place in 2010
and subsequent years. NASA's human spaceflight program is grounded, and
billionaire Reid Malenfant is ready to mount his own space program based
on hand-me-down Shuttle hardware used to build a
Big Dumb Booster
with the capability to conduct an asteroid prospecting and proof-of-concept
mining mission with a single launch from the private spaceport he has
built in the Mojave desert. Naturally, NASA and the rest of the U.S. government
is doing everything they can to obstruct him. Cornelius Taine, of the
mysterious and reputedly flaky Eschatology, Inc., one of Malenfant's
financial backers, comes to him with what may be evidence of
“downstreamers”—intelligent beings in the distant
future—attempting to communicate with humans in the present.
Malenfant (who is given to such) veers off onto a tangent and
re-purposes his asteroid mission to search for evidence of
contact from the future.
Meanwhile, the Earth is going progressively insane. Super-intelligent
children are being born at random all around the world, able to
intuitively solve problems which have defied researchers for
centuries, and for some reason obsessed with the image of a blue
disc. Fear of the
“Carter catastrophe”,
which predicts, based upon the
Copernican principle
and
Bayesian inference,
that human civilisation is likely to
end in around 200 years, has uncorked all kinds of craziness
ranging from apathy, hedonism, denial, suicide cults,
religious revivals, and wars aimed at settling old scores
before the clock runs out. Ultimately, the only way to falsify
the doomsday argument is to demonstrate that humans
did survive well into the future beyond it, and Malenfant's
renegade mission becomes the focus of global attention, with
all players attempting to spin its results, whatever they
may be, in their own interest.
This is a story which stretches from the present day to
a future so remote and foreign to anything in our own experience
that it is almost incomprehensible to us (and the characters
through which we experience it) and across a potentially
infinite landscape of parallel universes, in which
intelligence is not an epiphenomenon emergent from the
mindless interactions of particles and fields, but rather
a central player in the unfolding of the cosmos. Perhaps
the ultimate destiny of our species is to be eschatological
engineers. That is, unless the squid get there first.
Here you will experience the sense of wonder of the very
best science fiction of past golden ages before everything
became dark, claustrophobic, and inward-looking—highly
recommended.
April 2012 