Ratings8
Average rating3.1
Stephen Baxter's highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence finally enters the SF Masterwork series! A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. These can be traded for food from the Raft, a structure built from the wreckage of the ship, on which a small group of scientists preserve the ancient knowledge which makes survival possible. Rees is a Miner whose curiosity about his world makes him stow away on a flying tree - just one of the many strange local lifeforms - carrying trade between the Belt and the Raft. And what he finds will change his world...
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This is the second Stephen Baxter novel I've read. I really enjoyed The Thousand Earths. This one, not so much. Some neat ideas but I never felt engaged in the story. It mostly follows the generation ship tropes and cliches with some pretty weird stuff thrown. The Raft isn't a generation ship but it functions like one for all intents and purposes. It just felt like it didn't do those tropes very well. And the weird bits seemed thrown in just to be weird.
This was one of Baxter's earliest works so I'm not dissuaded from giving him another shot down the road.
Series
17 primary booksXeelee Sequence is a 17-book series with 17 primary works first released in 1991 with contributions by Stephen Baxter and Paul McAuley.