Stephen Baxter, Britain's foremost author of "hard" SF rooted in real physics, is renowned for thinking big. Time begins with a US entrepreneur's deceptively low-key plans to reclaim space and exploit the asteroids, bypassing NASA's bureaucracy and safety regulations. One bizarre cost-cutting measure: the "Big Dumb Booster" pilot is a genetically enhanced, intelligent squid. Then the mission is redirected following a weird mathematical prediction that humanity hasn't long to live, and a "Feynman radio" transmission from the future that highlights a particular asteroid. Here a space-time gateway opens on unimaginably distant futures, stepping far beyond the dying sun of Wells's The Time Machine to visions of a galaxy reshaped by humanity to hoard its energy ... beyond stars, beyond black holes, beyond even mass. And the emerging message, seen most clearly by a new generation of persecuted, ultra-gifted children, is that this seeming triumph--this total exploitation of our universe's possibilities--isn't good enough. A better path awaits, via a cataclysm that dwarfs mere supernova explosions... Baxter pays homage to the transformations of Clarke's Childhood's End (there's also a nod to 2001), but without the mysticism: it's all respectable, if speculative, physics. His final, devastating payoff makes sequels seem impossible. Two are planned. Rousing stuff, on a cosmic scale. --David Langford

2008-03-03 A waste of...?

I discovered Baxter via the Gollancz 'Future Classics' series which included his uber-epic, 'Evolution'. It was one of the most unique books I've ever read (and I've read a lot), spanning the entire evolution of the human race, and I would recommend it to anyone with even a quarter of a brain.
'Time' on the other hand, was a disappointment of truly epic proportions. I have harboured a desire to write novels myself, but I've never gone through with it for fear of it turning out exactly like this. The structure of the story is so amateur in its construction it actually made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion, with potential plot-lines being discarded even before they've begun. You can tell without doubt that when the writer began this book he had absolutely no idea what was going to happen at the end, or if he did then he changed his mind several times en route, ultimately ending it by killing off all but one character and wiping out the entire universe,presumably to give himself a clean slate on which to hastily scrawl the two sequels, 'Space' and 'Origin', which incidentally I shall never read, so little do I care about the outcome of this jumbled 'saga'.
Baxter obviously has some radical and far reaching ideas about time, space and other inherently 'big' concepts, but his laughable attempt at character development meant I had very little desire to keep reading, only doing so because I'm still waiting on my next Amazon shipment. In fact I actively disliked most of the characters: the ludicrously named Reid Malenfant, the 'star', is a middle-aged entrepeneur clearly based on Baxter himself, or at least what Baxter dreams of being, and is used as the instigator for all of the plot u-turns; his ex-wife is possibly the most annoying character in any book I've ever come across - all she does is follow Reid around moaning at him about money and bills and blah blah blah. I was ready to kill her by the end, but luckily Baxter took care of that for me in one of his impulsive changes of story. The effect of all the high-science stuff interspersed with this pathetic domestic bickering was like skipping back and forth between The Sky At Night and Eastenders.
All in all I found this book to be a complete waste of time. If it hadn't been for Evolution I would have written Baxter off as a seriously sub-standard author. As it is I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he's just inconsistent.
So if you're thinking of buying this, don't. Buy Evolution instead. Or, even better, buy the Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons and be over-awed by the magnificent potential of sci-fi.