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The first book in the trilogy, Manifold: Time, began the story of entrepreneur Reid Malenfant, a man obsessed with exploring space and colonizing the stars. While his bootstrap company launches a squid-piloted spacecraft to mine a nearby asteroid, the Earth's population falls into chaos with news of civilization's imminent end. With time running out for humanity, Malenfant discovers technology that can unveil the future by detecting coded quantum waves traveling back through time. By understanding human "downstreamers," Malenfant tries to figure out how early-21st-century humankind can survive extinction.
In Manifold: Space, Baxter showed us an alternate Reid Malenfant. At 60 years old, he and quirky Japanese researcher Nemoto discover the existence of alien intelligence in the solar system. It seems self-replicating machinelike beings have entered the solar system in strange flower ships and are mining the asteroid belt. After entrepreneur Frank Paulis sends an unmanned spaceship to check out the aliens, who are called Gaijin, and the ship is captured and dismantled, Malenfant sets out to make first contact. En route to the asteroid belt in a salvaged spacecraft, Malenfant finds a large circle of blue metal floating in space. It's some type of gateway. But Malenfant doesn't know what's on the other side. His dream of contacting the Gaijin propels him on and he floats through the circle…
In Manifold: Origins, the mysterious blue metal disc appears again, this time high above Africa. In this episode, Reid Malenfant is an aging astronaut on a public relations tour of Africa. Having just found out that he has been scratched from an upcoming shuttle mission because of a medical technicality (it was really his abrasive personality and bad attitude), Malenfant quits the tour and heads back home with his wife Emma in a borrowed jet. But when he hears there has been a UFO sighting nearby, he has to check it out. Two things happen simultaneously: a huge blue disc appears in the sky, and our familiar gray moon is suddenly replaced with a much larger red one.
Strange objects -- it turns out they're primitive hominids -- tumble out of the disc and fall to the Earth, where they are instantly killed. Wild turbulence fills the air around the disc; Malenfant loses control of the plane and is forced to eject. He lands safely, but his wife Emma is pulled through the disc and disappears. Convinced the strange object is a portal to the red moon, Malenfant vows to somehow rescue his wife. After all, it's his fault she is there in the first place. With the help of Nemoto, a young Japanese astronaut, he raises enough money for the dangerous journey.
Once on the much larger moon, Malenfant and Nemoto discover a primitive world filled with a diversity of semi-intelligent hominids: tall nomadic Runners, savage-talking chimps (called Elf folk), humanoids with tails, English speaking Neanderthals, even godlike apes.
As Malenfant and Nemoto slowly unravel the mystery of the red moon, the origins of mankind and the Fermi Paradox (if aliens existed, they would be here), Emma is desperately trying to survive among a group of savage cavemen who can't remember yesterday.
Malenfant's incredible journey through time and space not only entertains but also enlightens, raising profound questions about humanity's ultimate place in the universe. Manifold: Origin is a wonderful, thought-provoking story -- a great novel in an even better series. (Paul Goat Allen)
"What about the Uprights?"
"What?"
"What life span can they expect?"
De Bonneville looked irritated. "Thirty or forty years, I suppose. What does it matter? I'm talking about Homo Sapiens, Malenfant."
Despite de Bonneville's claims about progress, Malenfant soon noticed that mixed in with the clean and healthy and long-lived citizens there were a handful who looked a lot worse off. These unclean were dressed reasonably well. But each of them-man, woman, or child-was afflicted by diseases and deformities. Malenfant counted symptoms: swollen lips, open sores, heads of men and women like billiard balls to which mere clumps of hair still clung. Many were mottled with blackness about the face and hands. Some of them had skin that appeared to be flaking away in handfuls, and there were others with swollen arms, legs and necks, so that their skin was stretched to a smooth glassiness.
All in all, the same symptoms as Pierre de Bonneville.
De Bonneville grimaced at his fellow sufferers. "The Breath of Kimera," he hissed. "A terrible thing, Malenfant." But he would say no more than that.
When these unfortunates moved through the crowds the other Waganda melted away from them, as if determined not even to glance at the unclean ones.
They reached the cane fence that surrounded the village at the top of the hill. They passed through a gate and into the central compound.
Malenfant was led to the house that had been allotted to him. It stood in the center of a plantain garden and was shaped like a marquee, with a portico projecting over the doorway. It had two apartments. Close by there were three domelike huts for servants, and railed spaces for-he was told-his bullocks and goats.
Useful, he thought.
The prospect from up here was imperial. A landscape of early summer green, drenched in sunshine, fell away in waves. There was a fresh breeze coming off the huge inland sea. Here and there isolated coneshaped hills thrust up from the flat landscape, like giant tables above a green carpet. Dark sinuous lines traced the winding courses of deep treefilled ravines separated by undulating pastures. In broader depressions Malenfant could see cultivated gardens and grain fields. Up toward the horizon all these details melted into the blues of the distance.
It was picture-postcard pretty, as if Europeans had never come here. But he wondered what this countryside had seen, how much blood and tears had had to soak into the earth before the scars of colonialism had been healed.
Not that the land wasn't developed pretty intensely: notably, with a network of irrigation channels and canals, clearly visible from up here. The engineering was impressive, in its way. Malenfant wondered how the Kabaka and his predecessors had managed it. The population wasn't so great, it seemed to him, that it could spare huge numbers of laborers from the fields for all these earthworks.
Maybe they used Uprights, whatever they were.
Anyhow, he thought sourly, so much for the pastoral idyll. It looked as if Homo Sap was on the move again-building, breeding, lording it over his fellows and the creatures around him, just like always.
In this unmanaged biosphere, immersed in air that was too dense and too hot and too humid, Malenfant had trouble sleeping; and when he did sleep, he woke to fuzzy senses and a sore head.
There was no way to get coffee, decaffeinated or otherwise.
The next afternoon Malenfant was invited to the palace.
The katekiro-Nemoto-came to escort him, evidently under orders. "Come with me," she said bluntly. It was the first time she'd spoken directly to Malenfant.
"Nemoto, I know it's you. And you know me, don't you?"
"The Kabaka is waiting."
"How did you get here? How long have you been here? Are there any other travelers here?"
Nemoto wouldn't reply.
They approached the tall inner fence around the palace itself. He wasn't the only visitor today, and a procession drew up. The ordinary Waganda weren't permitted beyond this point, but they crowded around the gates anyhow, gossiping and preening.
There was a rumbling roll of a kettle drum, and the gate was drawn aside; they proceeded-chiefs, soldiers, peasants, and interstellar travelersinto a complex of courtyards.
There was a wide avenue inside the fence, and at the fence's four corners those spectacular fountains thrust up into the air, rising fifteen meters or more. The water emerged from crude clay piping that snaked into the ground beneath the palace. Maybe there were pumps buried in the hillside.
Malenfant approached the nearest fountain. He reached out to touch the water. Christ, it was hot, so hot it almost scalded his fingers. Nemoto pulled his arm back. Her hand on his was leathery and warm.
The drums sounded again. They passed through courtyard after courtyard, until finally they stood in front of the palace itself.
It was only a grass hut. But it was tall and spacious, full of light and air. Malenfant, who had once visited the White House, had been in worse government buildings.
The heart of the palace was a reception room. This was a narrow hall some twenty meters long, the ceiling of which was supported by two rows of pillars. The aisles were filled with dignitaries and officers. At each pillar stood one of the Kabaka's guards, wearing a long red mantle, white trousers, black blouse, and a white turban ornamented with monkey skin. All were armed with spears. But there was no throne there, nor Mtesa himself. Instead there was only what Malenfant took to be a well, a rectangular pit in the floor.
Malenfant, Nemoto, and the rest had to sit in rows before the open pit.
Drums clattered, and puffs of steam came venting up from the well mouth, followed by a grinding, mechanical noise. A platform rose up out of the well, smoothly enough. Once again, Malenfant wondered where the energy for these stunts came from. The platform carried a throne-a seat like an office chair-on which sat the lean figure of Mtesa himself. Mtesa's head was clean-shaven and covered with a fez; his features were smooth, polished and without a wrinkle, and he might have been any age between twenty-five and thirty-five. His big, lustrous eyes gave him a strange beauty, and Malenfant wondered if there was Upright blood in there. Mtesa was sweating, his robes a little rumpled, but was grinning hugely...
Anonymous
Posted January 18, 2003
This story is one of the most vivid books I have read this year. It takes sci-fi to a whole new level, with Baxter's great imagination and writing skills.
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Posted January 24, 2000
The end of the world, or, merely, the end of life as we know it, has been one of man's greatest fears. Author Stephen Baxter's MANIFOLD: TIME does not exploit nor hide behind such dire threats. Rather, Baxter uses this most human concern as a catalyst for his action-based novel, demonstrating that man's survival instinct is so great that it bears the potential to transcend time. Told in the near-distant future and centering around a diverse group of characters (the rogue space hero; the independent, yet dutiful ex-wife; the politician with a conscience; the seemingly mad mathematician; the genius child; and the brain-enhanced squid), MANIFOLD: TIME is a story spanning so many levels, you'll be thinking about it long after you've turned the last page!
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Posted May 11, 2009
Right up until the end, I felt like I'd read this story before (A.C. Clarke, Rbt Heinlen), but then Baxter walloped me with the plot twist. I will probably read the rest of the series but mostly it's to find out what happens to the squid.
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Posted December 15, 2002
This series is definitely worth reading.
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Posted January 22, 2002
'Manifold: Time' exposes its audience to an abundance of popular neo-science ideas such as space&time travel, genetics, and black holes. The story is original in it's exploration of these ideas but the plot has some similarities to Sir Clark's '...2001' saga that took away from my enjoyment of reading the book. Mr. Baxter is a mathematician and scientist first; his ideas are exciting, clear and manages to be very convincing for a fiction novel. However, Mr. Baxter as a writer is not a captivating storyteller and his book suffers from it. In between the fast paced, fun bits are a few slow moving trivial sub plots (that go NOWHERE). I'm also very concerned by the way 'Manifold: Time' concludes and what the other two Manifold books promise; The questions keep coming, without much answers. Overall; Recommended only to those who enjoy neo-science and expect to good spend time learning a few new things. 'Manifold: Time' is a good book that should be better, however Mr. Baxter still has two more Manifolds to get it perfect!
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Reid Malenfant has wanted to be an astronaut since he was a little boy. When NASA accepted him into the space program as a pilot, he was ecstatic. He flew a few missions and was a great spokesperson for the agency until he was scrubbed from his latest assignment.
While flying with his wife Emma over Africa in a T-38, he saw a new red moon appear in the sky. Emma and Reid eject from the plane but while he floats back to Earth, Emma floats through a blue wheel that suddenly appears and lands her on the new moon. Not expecting help to arrive anytime soon Emma does her best to survive, learning many shocking facts about the human race along the way. Reid, in the meantime, mounts a public outcry to allow him to visit the red moon and get his wife back.
This final installment in the Manifold series is a fascinating tale that delves into multiple dimensions, the evolution of mankind and the true reality of the Red Moon. The emphasis in this science fiction novel is the science and Stephen Baxter does a fabulous job of keeping this work realistic within the framework of modern technologies and astrophysics.
Harriet Klausner
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Posted January 14, 2000
Manifold:Time is a well paced, well thought out adventure through some of the more esoteric conceptions found in the outskirts of modern physics. The characters, and in particular the main character, who is a entrepeneur in the best sense of the word, for such an idea driven plot, are well developed. The author extrapolates a near term future in which NASA is a strangled bureacracy and the world is beginning to collapse, and without space based material, the world will not be able to continue to expand. Then an artifact is discovered, and perceptions about the world change. In order not to give too much of the plot away, I won't mention each of the different technical devices used, but I particularly like the concept of (I think it was called) Feynman transfer, where messages from the future might be beamed to the present, if only we were able to detect them. I found less persuasive the use of, essentially, Bayesian statistics with relation to extrapolations of population growth and human survival, since such ad hoc assumptions are approximately as accurate as the 7 day outlook on the weather for the seventh day. As a final point, I liked the symetry, similiar to that found in 'The weapon shops of Isher', where events set in motion in the present can affect other parts of time and space, perhaps even in creative and wonderful ways.
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Posted January 23, 2000
While the main character, Reid Malenfant, seems at time to be nothing more than a foil for other characters, the plot and ideas more than make up for this slight detraction. A facinating look that combines various ideas from as far back as twenty years ago. Very reminisicent of '2001' in its sense of wonder. But since it is a substantially larger book, the ideas are bigger and more numerous. Baxter's predictions of the future are disquieting because of how logical he has extrapolated his ideas. A near flawless science fiction novel.
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Posted January 12, 2000
Stephen Baxter's intriguing book provides a new view to predicting Earth's end. His style of writing, although a bit slow at times, allows the characters to develop to bring the story to its irreversible end, and what an ending it is. I am impressed by Baxter's creativity. For an author with such an extensive technical background he goes beyond that call to incorporate simplicity to the scientific material and to explore the depth and interaction of his characters leading to earth's outcome without being humdrum! A most enjoyable book, well written and would recommend it to all sci-fi buffs who really want food for thought. Ceridwen 'C.J.' Johnson Toronto, Canada
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Overview
“ONE OF THE BEST SF WRITERS IN THE BUSINESS . . . [Manifold: Origin is] filled with marvelous scientific speculations, strange events, novel concepts, and an awe-inspiring sense of the wonders of the universe.”–Science Fiction Chronicle
In the year 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 his wife, Emma), Malenfant’s quest to uncover the unknown becomes personal. While desperately searching to ...