REVIEW: Stephen Baxter's MANIFOLD trilogy

Stephen Baxter's Manifold trilogy is basically a collection of three books with the same characters which tell different (albeit related) stories involving these characters in parallel universes with different time-lines.

After seeing a blurb from Grandmaster of Science Fiction Robert A. Heinlein on the back of one of these books by Steve Baxter I mooched the entire set from bookmooch.com last April and read them over the summer.

It's taken me this long to write my reviews of the novels and the delay has not made me kinder towards these books. The first one I read (Manifold: Time) turned out to be the best of the bunch, followed by Manifold: Space with Manifold: Origin picking up the rear. Actually, Manifold: Origin is probably the most gripping of the three, but only for about the first half of the book, and it has a completely unreadable sub-plot. I rated Manifold: Time the highest because it sustains interest for the longest duration, but it is really not the most interesting of the three.

A curious feature of the trilogy is that you can actually read them in any order. Because of the parallel but non-causally related universes each book's plot has the same characters (and even some of the same events) but told from other characters' perspectives.

It was actually pretty difficult to finish all three novels. Unfortunately, Baxter's work shares the same well-known flaw as Heinlein's: an inability to coherently complete an entire book of science fiction. For about two-thirds of a book, Heinlein's works have always been engaging and then they go completely off the deep end (if one actually completes reading the book instead of flinging it from you in disgust.)

Actually, the Los Angeles Times recently weighed on the sensitive issue of Heinlein's legacy by publishing a curious piece entitled "Robert Heinlein's future may be past" on Sunday December 9.

Heinlein, who in life was a divisive figure, has become, in death, a polarizing one and even something of a punch line. "When an emerging science-fiction writer's work earns him comparisons to Robert A. Heinlein," Dave Itzkoff begins a 2006 New York Times review, "should he take them as a compliment?"

[...]

Though he became a symbol of all that was backward to the new wavers, some cite him as a major influence. "He was the enemy -- yes," said Samuel R. Delany, a leader of the '60s insurgence who is also black and gay. "But he was the enemy to be bested at his own game. We took his rhetorical tricks, his ways of dramatizing an argument, and then used them to dramatize arguments he would have hated."

Despite a backlash of masculine, hard-science-driven work in the early Reagan era, the new wave effectively won the war when cyberpunk and its variations became the dominant strains over the last few decades.

Sadly, Stephen Baxter's work is reminiscent of Heinlein's -- this is not a compliment.

GRADE A-: Manifold: Time
GRADE B-: Manifold: Origin
GRADE B+: Manifold: Space