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Baxter's work, if I'm remembering the right author, is generally difficult stuff. This one, though, really aggravated me, because the whole thing (including all the characters' motivations) revolves around a flawed concept of how statistics and probability work. In brief, this is the notion of a "probabilistic doomsday," which suggests that because the probability of any given human being alive now is very small if the future holds an indefinitely expanding or even stabilizing population of humans, then the real future must involve a population crash of Malthusian proportions. Circular argument much? Further, in the real science of probability and statistics, nobody who wants to be regarded as sane would suggest that the overall shape of a probability curve can be extrapolated from any one or three of its constituent observations. AND finally, the curve representing total human population over time is not a probability curve at all - it's a statement of fact and/or extrapolation, not a sample taken from an actual or postulated total population! But if none of this bothers you, then you might enjoy this tale of a "successful" effort to save the human race from eventual extinction at the heat death of the universe. (No, really. That's the part that seems to make more sense than this other thing, if you're really inclined to obsess over something that far off.) And it's not, by the by, a fun book for a theist either.