The characters are from different times and alternative universes. (Warning: spoilers for the first book here, because this one doesn't make sense unless you know what's happened there!) In the 25th century Malenfant meets people from his past who are not from his actual past but alternative pasts. The ending was a bit of a cliffhanger, too. It was interesting, unmistakably Baxter, but used Reid Malenfant, a character as its focus that I’d not really liked the first time around, in the Manifold trilogy. Last year I reviewed the first book in this series, World Engines: Destroyer, with mixed results. Anyway, this was a generally massive disappointment after the enjoyable first volume. Either Baxter’s resolution is unconvincing, or I did not understand it properly, but I had to go back and rescan this last section. It is just too much info dumping and not nearly enough plot as a necessary narrative propellant.Īnd then the ‘mystery’ of the World Engineers themselves is wrapped up in barely a third of a 500-page novel. Maybe Baxter thought this is riveting stuff, who knows.
Then at the Russian camp the poor reader is subjected to a deep dive into ‘rocketry for dummies’ and how to escape the gravity well of a super-earth using only chemical rockets. Baxter goes into excruciating detail about everything imaginable. Firstly, the trek itself is roughly two thirds of the book. The goal is to enlist the Russians’ help to get off-planet by hopefully cannibalising their crashed spacecraft. They have to undertake an epic 100 km trek to the site where a Russian spacecraft crashed much earlier and the survivors established a camp. Our intrepid heroes have now crash-landed on the super-earth Persephone in some alternate worldline. I am a huge fan of Stephen Baxter, but man this book was a slog.
Peace and love, as John Lennon would say.
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