I Read Books: Phase Space
Manifold: Phase Space
A collection of Stephen Baxter’s science fiction short stories from 1997-2003. They are loosely framed by his story Touching Centauri, a story from the Manifold, though from none of the Earths in Time, Space or Origin.
Some of them are explicitly Manifold stories (of which more in a moment). As the Manifold is a sheaf of related realities, created by the Old Ones, the far future descendants of humanity in Time, many of the others could equally be so.
Baxter’s interest in alternative and near-future space programs is a theme going through. NASA astronauts appear again and again, especially moonwalkers. Jay Hollands and Burdick each appear once, but the alternative moonlanders Bardo, Slade and (up in the orbiting module) Pond, make more than one entry. In alternative guises for that matter. In one they are in a simulation from the far future of Baxter’s novel Titan.
Simulations and other realities are another idea that comes through several times. In Glass Earth Inc a murder has taken place in a world of total surveillance – though one mediated by guardian angels who censor things that should not be seen. Dante Dreams suggests that Dante’s Divine Comedy has an alternative meaning with four-dimensional geometry. And pioneering Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin finds himself taking his legendary voyage – again.
Anyway, here’s the idea of the Manifold from Time, Space and Origin. On the Earth of Time, humanity spreads out into space, across the universe, But deep downstream, when entropy wins and all energy is used up, they decide this was the wrong move and reach back in time to change things.
Universes are born in singularities, so a universe that has more singularities creates more universes*. More universes means more alternatives, more ways of living. That will be better than the deep, dark ending explored in Time. Hence the ending of Time where the quantum state of the universe is reset, causing all matter to become singularities, producing a much greater number of universes that had their origin in that universe.
Another question that recurs is that of the Fermi Paradox; since Earth seems to be not especially notable or unusual, the universe is moderately old, and colonising the galaxy shouldn’t take many millions of years, why are there no aliens? The slightly out of left-field answer in Time is that this is the first universe to have intelligent life capable of toppling the quantum state, so intelligent life is rare.
In Space intelligent life isn’t rare; it’s everywhere, and has been here before. The universe is always being explored and exploited by aliens. This is the case because there keep being resets on smaller and greater scales, civilisations being wiped out to make room for new ones.
Origin brings in the idea of other humans, not just the various versions of Reid Malenfant and the people around him we’ve met several times. But alternate hominids, other species. The Red Moon was designed to travel between different universes in the Manifold, there to sweep up and then deposit various species of human (also other animals and presumably plants too). By isolating various populations they then speciated and, perhaps, adapted to their new environment.
This sheaf of universes was chosen by the Old Ones because in any universe where there were aliens, humans did not survive. It’s mediated by difference in the Big Whack, the primordial collision that created the moon. And now the machinery, the Red Moon’s universe hopping ability, is breaking down, perhaps unguided.
Anyway, that’s the Manifold. In Touching Centauri, the last-but-one story in Phase Space and the frame for the others, a laser is used to try and bounce a signal off the Centauri system, the nearest star (other than the sun). The returning signal is not as expected and in it’s wake the solar system changes, alternate versions of Saturn, then Jupiter, Mars etc. At last they get to see different Earths, some of which are those in the stories here.
This is the only one that casts any real light on the Manifold series, by tackling the Fermi paradox from another angle. (Also a new view of amoral apocalyptic mathematician Cornelius Tane, a more prophetic figure than Baxter might have anticipated). A short story rather than a novel the themes and interests are a bit clearer, suggesting that we could, if we were reductive, make each volume of the series a solution to the Fermi Paradox. Or we could consider it a variety of meditations of a grounded astronaut and his relationship with space, especially the moon.
But what if we don’t care about the Manifold, and wish to consider the collection on it’s own merits? Well many of these are in the mode of classic science fiction of making an interesting assumption and running with it. The better ones do something interesting on them, for example War Birds and Sun God, each imagining very different space programs. The best ones manage to combine some real character and imagination, the 12th Album at the end standing out with it’s concept of a Beatles album from another world – on a ship that sank in our world.
Read This: A collection of clever science fiction stories,
embroidering on several ideas and themes, sometimes transcending them
Don’t Read This: A big pile of of rockets and simulations and
alternate words
* The terminology (multiple UNIverses, more SINGULARities) is very funny to me
Comments