Stephen Baxter (tribute site: www.themanifold.co.uk) lives in Morpeth, England. He is now one ofthe big names in SF, with more than twenty SF novels published to date, and a large body of shortfiction. “I always thought of myself as writing hard SF, on a big scale maybe, but ideas driven,not romantic, so not space opera,” he says. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia summarizes his earlycareer thus: “He began publishing SF with “The Xeelee Flower” for Interzone in 1987, which withmost of his other short work fits into his Xeelee Sequence, an ambitious attempt at creating aFuture History; novels included in the sequence are Raft (1989), Timelike Infinity (7992), Flux (1993), and Rind (1994). The sequence… follows humanity into interstellar space, where itencounters a complex of alien races; the long epic ends (being typical in this of UK SF) darkly,many aeons hence.” Since the mid 1990s he has produced five or ten short stories a year infantasy, SF, and horror venues, occasionally one in the Xeelee Sequence, and did in 2005 again.
“Lakes of Light” was published in Constellations. It is a Xeelee story of alien supertechnology,somewhere between a Hal Clement and a Larry Niven setting. As the story progresses, newwonders are seen and new layers of insight are reached. This is the essence of hard SF
