NP: Stephen Baxter

[Daniel Harper]

I think Baxter's _The Time Ships_ is one of my favorite books. It's a sort
of sequel to H.G. Wells' _Time Machine_, following the same character as he
travels forward in time once again and reaches a far different future.

(To be fair, I liked _Timelike Infinity_, although that may be partly just
because it was the first Baxter I read. I don't care much for _Flux_
though.)

Greg Egan is another writer who does Big Ideas well, although he focuses
more on nanotechnology, biochemistry, quantum mechanics rather than far-out
far-future cosmology. I really love _Quarantine_ and _Diaspora_.

I'm currently reading Philip Palmer's _Debatable Space_, which is just goofy
fun.

On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 12:29 PM, tbeshear <tbeshear at insightbb.com> wrote:

>
> Baxter is not Canadian -- he is British. Are you perhaps mixing him up
> with
> Robert Sawyer, who IS Canadian and who did a trilogy about a planet of
> intelligent dinosaur-like people? I don't care for Sawyer's work, for the
> most part.
>
> I'd agree that Timelike Infinity isn't a very good book. It one of the
> weaker links in his Xeelee Sequence.
> Baxter probably writes too much -- his work is uneven -- but his best,
> like
> Evolution or his Manifold and Destiny's Children trilogies, are very good.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Michael Richard" <veg at dvandva.org>
> To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Friday, March 07, 2008 6:19 PM
> Subject: Re: NP: Stephen Baxter
>
>
> >
> > I read _Raft_ and I like it a lot.  I like the ideas and the weird
> > universe in which it is set.  I read _Timelike Infnity_ and now I
> > can't bring myself to try anything imore by him: it's awful.
> >
> > There seem to be two big camps, and you either love or loathe him.
> > I don't really know which side I come down on.  When I asked about
> > the two I have read, I never really got an answer.
> >
> > He is Canadian, and has won Hugos.  Antifans point out this is when
> > the convention is in Canada.  Many of his novels are fat, and feature
> > cute dinosaurs in the cover, which furthers my lack of interest.
> >
> >
> > Now I'm reading _Wizard of the Crow_ by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and I
> > recommend it highly.
>



-- 
...the insanely, endlessly diddling play of a chemist whose molecules are
words...
--Daniel Harper
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