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I enjoyed attending Stephen Baxter's class…wait, this was a novel?? Manifold: Time is the epitome of a Baxter three-star effort: some mind-bending ideas about the cosmos, a plot, some classroom lessons, some bad exposition of facts and some cardboard characters. That being said, I have enjoyed three of the four Baxter novels I've read to date, including this one.

In true Baxter style, Manifold is a canvas for awesome cosmological theories and implications. I re-read passages to understand the scope. It was very cool in that respect. However, the characters are forgettable and are basically mouthpieces for the physics lessons. Also, and unfortunately, most of Baxter's books are lessons in how not to handle exposition in a story. Good exposition gives us information in the flow of the story. We don't even know it's being done. We're just being introduced to the author's world and ideas…naturally. Baxter kind of gives up and just uses a smart character to explain things to a less smart character, who is a proxy for the likely even less smart reader.

Manifold: Time covers the Doomsday argument, Fermi paradox, genetic engineering, and humanity's extinction. I occasionally read non-fiction that discusses these types of ideas, and I'm sure I could perhaps find better sources to base myself on, but I have a day job and I like fiction. So, as a rule, and to a limited extent, I forgive Mr. Baxter's failure to use good exposition and characterization. Whatever, it's fun. The fact that a ragtag plot holds some of the information together is fine. Just be prepared to read with your eyes constantly rolling due to how you're being fed the information.

In this first book in the Manifold series, entrepreneur Reid Malenfant has an idea to exploit an asteroid for space travel when he's convinced by a weirdo to communicate with future humans to figure out how to outsmart humanity's doomed destiny. There's Big Dumb Objects, statistics, time travel, black hole energy harvesting, and squids. In space.

A particular beef: this book introduced me to the concept of the "Carter catastrophe". In looking it up during and after the book, I'm pretty sure that Baxter could have described it a little better. When I read the probabilistic doomsday prediction in Manifold, it felt very flawed to me, and I couldn't let that go. I'm no mathlete but it was kind of the lynchpin to the whole story and I wasn't buying it. I also did not buy how quickly Malenfant accepts the theory wholesale.

I love being exposed to these kinds of ideas, so I will continue to read Baxter. In particular, I am fascinated by the Fermi paradox (the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations) and its solutions. I understand this is dealt with more in the sequel, Manifold: Space. I'll read that…and likely give it three stars and copy, paste, and only mildly edit this current review.