Which is a little surprising since I’m usually very forgiving when it comes to hard SF. The first part was better, but I ended up skimming pages in the last third of the book. So my first reaction is that I didn’t find Time very compelling or engaging.

(I may not even finish this trilogy given all the other stuff on my reading list.) If the rest of his work is this ‘serviceable’ I probably won’t be digging deeply into his catalog.

This might account for the ‘serviceable but not thrilling’ aspect of Time. He’s been writing since 1991, so 60 books (not to mention five non-fiction books) divided by 30 years is two books a year. That he cranked out the four volumes of this trilogy in four years while also putting out six other novels (and two non-fiction books) in that time says something. At this point I have a sense that Baxter might be a workhorse author, like Stephen King or Tom Clancy (or John Grisham or …). I did check out (in the library sense) Space and will check it out (in the giving it a look sense), but it’s possible I’ll put it down and move on. I enjoyed the first book, but I can’t say I was hugely whelmed. Each of the books tells a separate story in a separate universe. Time is the first of the Manifold trilogy (which has a fourth book, Phase Space) the second and third books are Space (2000) and Origin (2001). (There are SF authors I’ve only met in short story collections. Per his Wiki bibliography, he’s written only a half-dozen short stories, also none of which I’ve read. It’s my first exposure to Baxter, who has written 60 science fiction novels - none of which I’ve read.

Yesterday, courtesy of Cloud Library, I finished Manifold: Time (1999), by Stephen Baxter.

Stephen baxter manifold space