The Manifold Trilogy
4 primary works • 6 total works Complete
Book 1
In the millennium’s last great sf novel, Stephen Baxter takes us a short step byond Y2K. The year is 2010. We have survived … so far.
Cornelius Taine of Eschatatology, Inc., mathematical genius, pursues the logic of our very existence to its inescapable end. In just 200 years our species will be wiped out. Taine’s prediction is expressed in the universal language of numbers. It is elegant, sublime, irrefutable. Even evacuation from Earth will not save us from extinction.
Reid Malenfant, entrepreneur, is single-handedly reinventing the US space program as private enterprise. His company, Bootstrap, has Big Dumb Boosters ready to fly from the California desert to mine a near-Earth asteroid for its mineral wealth – piloted by an enhanced squid named Sheena 5. Malenfant’s vision of mankind’s future in space is brutally cut short, but then Taine offers him the ultimate dream of saving the species.
Emma Stoney, Bootstrap’s financial controller and Malenfant’s ex-wife, is dismayed. Emma knows to what extremes Malenfant will go in pursuit of a dream. Taine is certain people of the future will try to communicate with us if there is any way to avoid the catastrophe. So, using a particle accelerator, Malenfant tunes in to Feynman’s Radio – interference in the background radiation of the Big Bang – and there he does indeed discover a message from the future! Soon, in response, Sheena the squid is flying to a different asteroid – Cruithne, Earth’s remote second moon – for very different reasons.
What Sheena 5 discovers on Cruithne is nothing less than a revelation: the secret reason for our existence visible at last beneath the rippled surface of time’s river. Malenfant and Emma find their own lives, and their love, irrevocably bound up with the wider destiny of humanity as the continuing Feynman Radio signals, washing down over us from the future, begin the ultimate transformation of mankind.
TIME
MANIFOLD 1
Book 1
The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. As the world’s governments turn inward, one man dares to envision a bolder, brighter future. That man, Reid Malenfant, has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the exploration and colonization of space. Now Malenfant gambles the very existence of time on a single desperate throw of the dice. Battling national sabotage and international outcry, as apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, he builds a spacecraft and launches it into deep space. The odds are a trillion to one against him. Or are they?
“A staggering novel! If you ever thought you understood time, you’ll be quickly disillusioned when you read Manifold: Time.”—Sir Arthur C. Clarke
Book 2
2020. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, Reid Malenfant ventures to the far edge of the solar system, where he discovers a strange artifact left behind by an alien civilization: A gateway that functions as a kind of quantum transporter, allowing virtually instantaneous travel over the vast distances of interstellar space.
What lies on the other side of the gateway? Reid decides to find out. Yet he will soon be faced with an impossible choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself.
Meanwhile on Earth the Japanese scientist Nemoto fears her worst nightmares are coming true. Startling discoveries reveal that the Moon, Venus, even Mars once thrived with life. Life that was snuffed out not just once but many times, in cycles of birth and destruction. And the next chilling cycle is set to begin again . . .
Book 3
2015: Astronaut Reid Malenfant is flying over the African continent, intent on examining a mysterious glowing construct in Earth’s orbit.
But when the very fabric of the sky tears open, spilling living creatures to the ground and pulling others inside, including Reid’s wife, Emma, his quest to uncover the unknown becomes personal.
While desperately searching to discover what happened to the woman he loves, Reid embarks upon an adventure to the very fount of human development . . . on earth and beyond.
2025. Tied in to Baxter’s masterful Manifold trilogy, these thematically linked stories are drawn from the vast graph of possibilities across which the lives of hero Reid Malenfant have been scattered.
Reid Malenfant is the commander of a NASA earth-orbiting science platform. The platform is intended to probe the planets of the nearest star system by bouncing laser pulses off them. But no echoes are returned … and Reid's reality begins to crumble around him. Huddling with his family, awaiting the end – or an unknown new beginning – Reid tells stories of other possibilities, other realities.
The linked stories encompass the myriad possibilities that might govern our relationship with the universe: are we truly alone, or will we eventually meet other lifeforms? The final possibility – that the Universe as we know it is in fact an elaborate illusion designed to protect us from the fearful reality – is brilliantly explored in the tour de force novella that ends the volume.
