is a fast-paced story that traverses multiple universes and travels back and forth through time.The story revolves around Reid Malenfant and his ex-wife/employee, Emma Stoney. When the mysterious Cornelius Taine shows up in Emma’s office one day, life is never the same. The brilliant but seemingly crazy Taine convinces failed-NASA-astronaut/entrepreneur head of “Bootstrap Inc.” Malenfant that the “Carter catastrophe” (a probabilistic doomsday prediction) is real. Which causes him to change the entire focus of his business.
While Malenfant was never one to play by the rules, he pushes the envelope (and the legal system) enough to keep Emma busy as he builds a covert rocketship using old NASA Space Shuttle engines which he had bought for other purposes. They decide to fly to a tiny asteroid called “Cruithne” because of a message from the future that Malenfant and Taine intercepted using a Feynman Radio.
There’s a lot of physics and quantum mechanics discussed in the book. The book had a great mixture of futuristic science and interesting theories to keep me reading way past my bedtime.
The part that sounds really silly, and yet was actually believable was the brain-enhanced squid! Since squid are supposedly very intelligent creatures, author Baxter used them in an interesting way within the story.
Another sort of funny thing was that the book was set in the year 2010 at the outset, but there were a lot of futuristic things such as auto-piloted cars that we don’t have yet in the real 2010. The book was published in 2000, so I was a little surprised at how much Baxter imagined the world might change in just 10 years!
I really liked this book, and plan to read the next ones in the trilogy: Manifold: Space
and Manifold: Origin
.
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