Book Preview (Author’s note: I was sent the enclosed document anonymously, The document itself, a photocopy, is government-speak, blank to the point of unreadability. But the notes scribbled in the margins are intriguing.) United States General Accounting Office GAO report to the Honorable William X. Lambie, House of representatives Results of a Search for Records … Read more
Book Preview Manifold: Baxter, May 5, 2002 This is a third volume in the Manifold series; the same characters reappear in a different universe. Now, I agree with other reviewers. This book contained far too much violence and the Zealots (the “villains”) were disappointing. Baxter does best with antagonists who are never seen, such as … Read more
Book Preview Manifold series, book 2 To my nephew, Thomas Baxter. And Simon Bradshaw and Eric Brown Innumerable Suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these Suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds… —GIORDANO BRUNO (1548–1600) If they existed, they would be here. … Read more
Book Preview My nephew, James Baxter You know me. And you know I’m a space cadet. You know I’ve campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In fact, in the past I’ve tried to get you to pay for such things. I’ve bored you with that often enough already, right? So … Read more
Book Preview To David and Sarah Oliver and Colin Pillinger and the Beagle 2 team Prologue There is a flat, sharp, close horizon, a plain of dust and rocks. The rocks are carved by the wind. Everything is stained rust brown, like dried blood, the shadows long and sharp. Though the sun is rising, the … Read more
Book Preview A vast sheet of ice sits on the North Pole: immense, brooding, jealously drawing the moisture from the air. Glaciers, jutting from the icecap like claws, pulverize rock layers and carve out fjords and lakes. South of the ice, immense plains sweep around the planet, darkened by herds of mighty herbivores. The ice … Read more
Book Preview To Sandra, and the Calves of Probos My research for this book took me to the Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe; the Chobe National Park, Botswana; the George C. Page Museum at the Rancho La Brea tar pits, Los Angeles County; the Natural History Museum, London; and the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, … Read more
Book Preview CAITLIN WALKED INTO the garden through the lit-tle gate from the drive. Maureen was working on the lawn. Just at that moment Maureen’s phone pinged. She took off her gardening gloves, dug the phone out of the deep pocket of her old quilted coat and looked at the screen. “Another contact,” she called … Read more
Book Preview From Hartwell, David – Year’s Best SF 11 (2006) Stephen Baxter (tribute site: www.themanifold.co.uk) lives in Morpeth, England. He is now one of the big names in SF, with more than twenty SF novels published to date, and a large body of short fiction. “I always thought of myself as writing hard SF, … Read more
Book Preview I tracked him down at l-Con, a science fiction convention on Long Island— and eventually, lucky for me, got him to write the following. On the day La-ba met Ca-si she saved his life. She hadn’t meant to. It was un-Doctrine. It just happened. But it changed everything. It had been a bad … Read more
Book Preview The port of the Richard P Feynman opened with a sigh, and the cool air of WhatAPlace wafted into Stoner’s head. She walked down the ship’s ramp and onto a belt of earth that had been scorched to a deep, black crispness by the Feynman’s landing jets, and then further out to where … Read more
Book Preview Stephen Baxter’s fourth Destiny’s Children novel, Resplendent, will be out soon from Gollancz. It tells the wider story of the Destiny universe, and will include, among others, such Silver Ghost tales from Asimov’s as “On the Orion Line” (October/November 2000) and “Ghost Wars” (January 2006). The author is currently at work on a … Read more
Book Preview HIS BIRTH WAS VIOLENT. He was expelled from warm red-dark into black and white and cold, a cold that dug into his flesh immediately. He hit a hard white surface and roiled onto his back. He tried to lift his head. He found himself inside a little fat body, gray fur soaked in … Read more
Book Preview 1) RE-FORMATTING IN GENERAL I.e. changing the original from format X to format Y. Unless the text has been improved, I see no reason to release a ‘new’ version. This is a minor gripe but makes keeping track of improvements slightly more difficult. This doesn’t mean people who actually improve the original (Layout/Proofing) … Read more
Book Preview The flitter bucked. Lvov looked up from her data desk, startled. Beyond the flitter’s translucent hull, the wormhole was flooded with sheets of blue-white light which raced toward and past the flitter, giving Lvov the impression of huge, uncontrolled speed. “We’ve got a problem,” Cobh said. The pilot bent over her own data … Read more
Book Preview To Sandra, again. And to the rest of us, in hope of long perspectives Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far … Read more
Book Preview The girl from the future told me that the sky is full of dying worlds. You can spot them from far off, if you know what you’re looking for. When a star gets old it heats up, and its planets’ oceans evaporate, and you can see the clouds of hydrogen and oxygen, slowly … Read more
Book Preview In the past we humans, struggling to comprehend our place in the universe, imagined gods, and venerated them. But now we have looked across the width of the universe, and from its beginning to its end. And we know there are no gods. We are the creators of the future. And the only … Read more