People Come from Earth – Baxter, Stephen

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Like many of his colleagues writing near the beginning of the new cen-tury—Greg Egan comes to mind, as do people like Paul J. McAuley, Mi-chael Swanwick, Iain M. Banks, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Brian Stableford, Gregory Benford, Ian McDonald, Gwyneth Jones, Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, David Marusek, Geoff Ryman, Alastair Reynolds, and a half dozen others—British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for the last ten years or so with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the

“hard-science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the Cutting Edge of science which bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.

Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as mak-ing sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific of the new writers of the past decade, and is also rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pas-tiche The Time Ships (a sequel to The Time Machine), which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K.