There are two positive things I can say about the Wheel of Ice.Author Stephen Baxter is superb at the art of world building and Wheel of Ice is full of great concepts: Pioneers in space, a society where humans are segregated by categories A, B, and C. And a more rigorous pioneer lifestyle for you...
Stephen Baxter (author of the 'Xeelee Sequence' series of sci-fi novels) was chosen to write this Second Doctor adventure. Which is probably aimed at us older fans who wanted a bit more from the BBC's range of Doctor Who novels. The plot does meander a bit and I found the background 'interludes' ...
Preface: Have only read one Stephen Baxter book before, Sunstorm, which he co-authored with Arthur C. Clarke. Masterful writing by Baxter. Stone Spring not only portrays the changing physical geography of climate change but the changing human geography as well. Baxter creates a simulated world wh...
This is the sort of fourth book in the Manifold series and is a collection of short stories, many of which connect to the series.Moon-Calf: A retired astronaut comes to England and finds hints of an ancient space voyage. A lovely idea which was really well executed. Open Loops: A human expansion ...
Taking on the task of writing a sequel to H.G. Wells’ classic The Time Machine must have been like painting a target on his back. Having read Baxter’s Xeelee Omnibus I was very curious if Baxter can pull it off as the Xeelee books are very hard sci-fi with some very complicated scientific exposit...
The whole aspect of destruction is one that arouses a lot of interest for a non-connected observer. This could explain why newsreel footage of terror attacks, calamities and accidents glue so many viewers across continents to their television sets. Movies like Independence Day ,Deep Impact and Ar...
This is not just one book, but loosely connected, two and a bit – a historical novel, a biological thriller and a science fiction short story – under one cover.The historical novel is about a girl growing up in Britain in the 5th century A.D., while the Roman rule disintegrates. Now, I am not a f...
You know that whole "don't judge a book by its cover" thing? Yeah, well, I totally did. In a heady bit of book buying when I graduated from college and got a full time job, I may have celebrated by overindulging in a Books-a-Million and grabbing anything that struck my fancy. I may or may not ...
From School Library Journal Adult/High School-Set in the same vast time scale and future as Coalescent (2003) and Exultant (2004, both Del Rey), Transcendent can be read independently. Michael Poole is a middle-aged engineer in the year of the digital millennium (2047) and Alia is a recognizabl...
Time travel paradox bifurcate the hero's journey.Baxter has a head full of great concepts, and not all seem to make it to the page intact. The war between human and the mysterious Xeelee introduces a lot of wild concepts (most familiar among them the idea of war as Malthusian population control),...
When telling the stories of individuals and peoples, there are three questions the story must deal with: 1) Where did we come from? 2) Where are we going? and 3) What will become of us? In Evolution, Stephen Baxter tells the story of humankind itelf, ranging from humanity's nraw beginnings in...
3 down 1 to go. This was much more boring and more gory than the first 2. Baxter does have a love for making his readers flinch. As the series has progressed, he has lengthened the sections for each time period. Unfortunately, he hasn't made the characters any more compelling than when the sectio...
It was one of four fleets setting off that day, carrying Army Group A, the Ninth and Sixteenth Armies. From west to east, Fleet E was to sail from Le Havre, D from Boulogne, C from Calais, and B from Dunkirk, Ostend and Rotterdam. Fleet A, a figment of Wehrmacht planning, had only ever existed on...
He peered down at the planet, using the telescopic features of his softscreen, for long hours. It might have been Earth, yes: a little heavier, a little warmer, but nevertheless compellingly familiar, with a jigsaw arrangement of gray-brown continents and blue oceans and streaky white clouds and ...
Aelfric was alone here, working by the sputtering light of a goose-fat lamp. This inky womb was her favourite place, she thought, in all the world. The nib of her pen scratching softly at smooth vellum, Aelfric laboured over her copy of the fourth stanza of the Menologium of the Blessed Isolde: ...
The array was a hundred yards long. Six cup-shaped minors, each a yard across, were spaced along a spider-web boom. The mirrors were pointed away from Sol. The array was looking for planets, of other stars. For three months now, it had maintained its focus on a young blue-white star, as bright as...
The rest pitched camp in their practised fashion, laying down hearths, digging out storm shelters and latrine trenches, erecting their tepees and houses. The trucks, released from the ColU’s direct control for these simple tasks, got to work ploughing up yet another stretch of Arduan ground, digg...
Brod son of Maryam! I am Khilli son of Elios! Come out here and meet me! Brod, you are a coward and a kidnapper and a rapist, and I will avenge my sister! …’ Once off the smack, Tripp was met by her patient officer from New Denver, and escorted back through the besieging army’s camp. But even fro...
“How many are you?” Gary glanced at Domingo.“American accent. Florida maybe?” “Could be.” Gary cupped his hands and shouted back, “Three of us here. Others in the forest.” There was a pause. Then,“I go...
Medical tenders drifted alongside, hosing some kind of sealant into the living ship’s mighty wounds. The injured Spline had been allowed to join a flotilla of its kind, regular ships of the line. Living starships the size of cities are never going to be graceful, but I saw that their movements we...
Slowly, in shreds and shards, he became aware of the rustle of the Crust-trees, the tired stink of his own body, the endless yellow glow of the Air pushing into his closed eyecups. He’d used a few loops of frayed rope to bind himself loosely to a branch of an outlying tree, and now he could feel ...
‘Welcome to our Palace, Academician, Marshal! I regard myself as something of a scholar though I have no formal qualification, but I could hardly do my job without acquiring a little learning . . . Come, come, follow me.’ Coton, Vala, Sand and a single Coalition guard followed him into the ground...
A relief to get out of the small chamber where for hours he had been pre-breathing the low pressure pure oxygen that filled his suit. A relief, forty days after launch, to get out of the cramped, noisy environs of Seba and Halivah, the twin hulls of the Ark, that competitive, fractious hothouse. ...
The crew watched the disaster unfold, mouths slack in awe. The Atlantic impactor had been the biggest single chunk of the comet, but it had been as precisely targeted as the rest. It had come down in the middle of the ocean, on a ridge of continental-crust formation about ...
Two hours: it was that fact alone, that this evidently high-speed transport had taken a whole two hours to cross a radius of one hub of this tremendous cylinder, that drove home to Mardina the sheer scale of the structure she was entering. It was already hundreds of miles back to the port where s...
Johnson Space Center, Houston Rolf Donnelly swung his car into his space outside Building 30, the Mission Control Center. He got out, whistling. There was a new sign up, in a car park space close to the building: MCC M&O EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH. Donnelly laughed. Welcome to government work! You...
The security guards escorted Falcon from the ship into a connecting tunnel, through which he was free to roll on his wheeled undercarriage. He was led into what he quickly identified as a medical facility, being run under military auspices. The walls were painted an auster...