I Read Books: Time

Time

In the near future former astronaut Reid Malenfant’s Bootstrap corporation has many high tech solutions to the closing economic resource situation. He has a plan to colonise space. There are difficulties, bureaucracy, but there’s also opportunities. Use shuttle engines, other discarded parts of the space program.

Emma Stoney, Malenfant’s ex-wife and troubleshooter, tries to keep him out of trouble, the various projects on track. But Malenfant has so many projects, skirting laws and regulations. One of his backers is Eschatology Inc, run by the brilliant eccentric mathematician Cornelius Taine. He had a breakdown, came back and made a lot of money, and backs Bootstrap and other projects. He explains the Carter Catastrophe Hypothesis, the statistical theory that suggest humanity will end within two hundred years*.

There are super-intelligent children being born, known as Blues as they use a blue circle as a symbol. People fear them and want to use them. Malenfant and Taine discover a message from the future that directs them to send their first spacecraft to a different asteroid – Earth’s second moon Cruithne. That requires a different, more difficult path so it’s a one way trip for the pilot – a squid called Sheena 4**.

Sheena 4 is pregnant, and the machines designed to exploit the asteroid can be used to build habitats for the intelligent squid. They find something on the asteroid. Another blue ring, one that will let them learn about the future, right to the end of time. And the dwellers there, the far future descendants of humanity may have made a mistake, may have taken the wrong path.

If this sounds like it’s jam packed with ideas, from near-future space operations, to far future speculation, to communication across time, to squid intelligence, you’re right. And this is volume one of the Manifold trilogy (plus one volume of associated stories). I have not touched on the Manifold idea in this review, maybe I’ll do so when I look at the other volumes.

Read This: Science fiction packed with ideas each building on the other
Don’t Read This: Too many ideas, too many voices, a grim view of the future

* Real! Taine demonstrates like this. He has a bag, with either 9 white and 1 black stones, or 999 white and 1 black stones. He pulls stones out the bag. The third one is black. How many stones in the bag? Ten, says Malenfant (Taine says he’s got a bit better than 2/3 chance of being right)

We then look at human populations. If humans exist into the far future then there will be enormous numbers of them. Trillions, quadrillions, more. What are the odds that any particular one (you and I) are born now, near the start? Low.

Unless we’re average. There aren’t trillions more humans to come.

** Science Fiction is about talking squids in outer space as Margaret Atwood said