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I am a fan of Stephen Baxter's. Vacuum Diagrams and The Time Ships were two of my favorite sci-fi books in the last ten years (at least among the Sci Fi I have read.) And I was looking forward to diving into a meaty trilogy of his that I could be reading for awhile. However whereas those two novel's took some fascinating contemporary science and built interesting conflicts and narratives on top of them, this book drowns beneath them.

Too often the action gets bogged down in a scene where one scientist or mathematician is standing in a room with one of the protagonists (who were neither scientists nor mathematician)explaining some scientific principle or another which Baxter feels is imperative to the story. And just as the protagonists, through one cliche or another, express their confusion ("In English" - "X...tried to act like they understood." - "Malenfant tried to contain his frustrating confusion.") over and over and over again, so too was I squinting at the page and struggling to distill the important principles. Invariably the scientist or mathematician would sigh in patronizing frustration at the protagonist/me and simplify things...which they could have just done to begin with.

This happens over and over again to the point where I just got bored and ended up getting bogged down in this one for quite awhile. It's a pity because this past weekend I finally made a concerted effort to finish it and, where the first 250 pages were like a pushup drill, the last 150 were a lot of fun and I flew through them. In typical Baxter style, the story was elevated from interesting straightforward premises to questions about the very nature of the universe and what could be our place in it's present, beginning, and ultimate end. Even in the midst of the climax there was STILL that convention of the smart characters stopping to explain what was happening to the dullards in the story, but at that point the action had reached a level that I didn't care.

Even though I found this one excruciating at points I'm surprisingly still interested in the sequels, if only because I have no idea how this one could carry on. If you can soldier through the first half this one gets a hesitant recommendation.