Manifold: Time by Stephen Baxter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
An incredible tale that really is epic in scope. Like in his previous novel - The Time Ships - Baxter goes all out and delivers a story that spans the universe and time itself.
The story begins with the restart of the space program after NASA all but quit trying to explore space. An entrepenur called Reid Malenfant takes it upon himself to restart space exploration with the goal to reach a near Earth orbit asteroid called Cruithne with a spacecraft manned by a squid whose intelligence has been augmented via genetic tampering - and it just gets weirder from there. There's no shortage of grandiose ideas, but the problem here is that it's sometimes too much. The science needed to explain the story is very complicated and Baxter includes endless scenes where the characters are totally confused only to have the scientific goings-on explained to them in plainer language by another more brainy character. This goes on throughout ALL the book, endless explaining of what's happening instead of having the story explain itself. A tough read (this is one of those so-called Hard SF books), but I managed to get through it. This is the first novel in a trilogy but it can easily be read as a self-contained story since there is a definitive ending.
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