Origin

by Stephen Baxter

Book Overview

"One of the best SF writers in the business . . . [ Manifold: Origin is] filled with marvelous scientific speculations, strange events, novel concepts, and an awe-inspiring sense of the wonders of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0345430794
• ISBN13: 9780345430793
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: Del Rey Books
• Length: 441 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

A Magnificent, Awe-Inspiring Thrill Ride!

From front cover to back I felt woven into the multi-layered tapestry of every scene. One of my new favorites of its kind. Sometimes - When you really enjoy a certain genre, writer or subject, one may lack patience or even become subconciously "snobbish" with the approach, digestion and/or analyzation of any artist's latest release. It is with this in mind that I can only begin to understand the basis of any negative comments about this novel. Completely opening the mind to any eventuality and hypothesis - and Baxter's gift (and gift to us) of colorfully illustrating his epic, Hard Science, reality-based work allows those of us with less than a degree in physics the joy of intelligently pondering miracles such as the origins of galaxies, universes and life itself. The "ride" of Manifold:Origin was a favorite aspect for me. I smiled every time I saw a new scene title - could be a few pages away, or even a few paragraphs. Pleased, not only in anticipation of which landscape or scenario I would soon be in, but also because I cared deeply about the characters and places I'd just left behind. Getting back there was a pleasure and a relief...and so on, and again... Until at last you're there. Standing on the cradle of the universe, your mind racing with possibilities. If you let yourself, you are allowed a window to view a spectacular theory of the creation of space, time and life. With some creative visualization you can end up moved by this story. I was. This novel should be read and re-read. Shockingly truthful A breath-taking ride Deeply visual Scientifically digestable Heart-breakingly real Beautiful

There's a decent book in here somewhere

Have you ever been a good portion of the way through a book and been faced with the total certainty that it's not going anywhere. And yet, you've invested so much time in it that you feel silly not bothering to finish it and besides, it's not that bad. It's just not great. This was the situation I found myself in reading this book and true to form I did finish reading it only to find that the book was merely okay. Not good, certainly not great, but just "okay." I guess I should elaborate. This is the third (and presumably) last book in the "Manifold" trilogy, which so far has been a loose consortium of absolutely fascinating hard science ideas held together by fitfully entertaining plots. The stories may not have been nail-biters but the cosmic vision kept you coming back and made the experience memorable, although you won't achieve any kind of transcendence reading these. But they were fun, for what they were. Then we get to this book. By now, we know the drill, as Baxter reboots everything again and gives us the characters we've seen before, but in different circumstances. This time our hero Reid Malfenant is back (with his wife still alive, Emma sat out the last book due to death, so it's nice to have her along) and as usual he's ticking off NASA. But the book sets up its premise early on, as a weird red moon replaces the actual moon in the sky, also scooping up a bunch of people along the way. Emma winds up being one of those people and Reid throws together a mad gambit to go up there and rescue her and bring her back. Looking back, I'm not quite certain where the book went off the rails. The red moon, for whatever reason, contains a wide variety of hominid species all living together and while this should be the central mystery, Baxter goes absolutely nowhere with it for a long, long time. He sets up the whole weird society well enough, and integrates the people who have been picked up in previous trips, but the plot just sort of shambles along. Emma wanders around with other survivors. Reid attempts to get up there. Various other peoples with one word names and simple narrative style jump in just to spice things up without really adding anything to the overall story. Once in a while someone decides to sit up and ask, "Just what the heck is this here moon for?" On some level a lot of it feels like Baxter just killing time and the book is so stretched out that when the Big Ideas start to come, you run the risk of just not caring anymore. Page upon page deal with people just wandering around, or beating each other up, or foraging for food, or engaging in acts that I really can't describe here, to no real purpose, it seems. Subplots feel tacked on and Baxter fumbles his money shot with the ending, which is generally the place where he dazzles us with his knowledge of science and his interpretation of whatever wild theory he's been reading up on. In the first two books, his grand visions made up for any shortcoming in plo

An excellent novel of big ideas and discovery-channel gore.

In my opinion, some readers have misunderstood the nature of this novel. It is a fragmented, gory, unpredictable story that leaves the reader simultaneously nauseous and confused. And this is the point. The Manifold series is a discovery of alternate universes, alternate possibilities, from the context of a central but loosely constructed character Reid Malenfant. In `Time' and `Space', Malenfant's adventures were more linear and core to a saga of the universe. In the final chapter of the trilogy, `Origin', Baxter discusses a set of possible evolutionary paths, a group of differently evolved humans, coexisting on a moon that jumps from one alternate possibility to another, with each group of humans acting out their primal instincts on one another. Malenfant acts more as an observer to a greater drama. Thus, this chapter is gory, because nature is gory. It is disjointed, in that transgressing alternate worlds is disjoining. It is exactly what it should be, a discussion of big ideas in a context where they can be understood and the relevance can be taken away and pondered. I give this novel five stars, not entirely of its own merit, but in collection with the previous two chapters. It fulfils my expectation of a story that allows me to stretch my imagination and at the same time challenge my humanity.

It was different from his other novels...

Origin was definitely different than Baxter's previous novels. I forced myself through several of his other novels feeling like I have re-read recycled material and usually skim through most of his discriptions of asteroids and moons which he goes into way too much detail. He did a great job in creating this new world and his new characters.I liked this book a lot. I would have to agree with the other readers in that it was much too violent and extremely disturbing. It has to remain realistic up to a certain point but the detail he gives exceeds what is necessary to get his point across.I would highly recommend this book. If you're new to Baxter, I would definitely urge that this be the first book you read.

Mind-blowing, touching, and flawed

ORIGIN finishes off Stephen Baxter's trilogy in a way that may initially seem less grand than the other space operatic installments, yet makes sense given that all three books deal with the Fermi Paradox and its depressing prospect that intelligent life is unique and alone in our universe, confined to Earth. In ORIGIN, Baxter responds by dropping the relentless quest for aliens pursued in the first two books, and instead tells a slightly more accessible story about what we do have--our humanity--and all the profound secrets and insights lying deep within our collective evolutionary past, and future(s). It is a story of the destiny of the human species. When the main characters from the series find themselves on a rogue, wandering moon that seems to be capable of traveling through the vast manifold of potential universes, Baxter directly justifies (not that it necessarily needed it) the reusing of the same characters gimmick that unites the trilogy, as well as provides for a few sly quips ("Maybe we knew each other in a past life" etc). In characteristic fashion, he flits from one stylized narrative to the next, presented from the eyes of the diverse hominids and pre-hominids that mysteriously share this primeval moon, assessing events in their own terms, all in minimalistic and lucid prose. Also characteristic of Baxter, the personalities are flimsy (even Emma Stoney, this story's definite heroine) and are often revealed to be little more than puppets ventriloquizing the author's ideas, or explanations. Inconsistencies abounds, most notably the huge fluctuations of apparent cognitive capacity held by various characters, and thecompletely pointless but nevertheless disturbing side-tale starring Shadow, an alienated and abused presapient "Elf-woman." Overall, though--for readers of TIME and SPACE--this is a strikingly dark story. For those who haven't cared to think about it, early life was grisly and short, poignant little bursts of sentience unfortunately chock-full of violence, rape, and cannibalism. Baxter explores this delightful blur of pain a little more acutely than I would have wanted, but ORIGIN's real heart of darkness is in its analysis of the humanity that we stake a claim to--us modernized humans who read stuff like this--and its essential faults, which I read to be overanalysis and the drive to possess and expand. The basic facts of our humanity are not so much decried as compared to other ways of life in the "It doesn't have to be this way..." scenario used throughout the MANIFOLD series. Needless to say there are many melancholy revelations sprinkled throughout, and a surprising ending which makes one question what redemption may be to a homo sap. Despite its shortcomings, I enjoyed ORIGIN better than the other two precisely because of the subject matter. Baxter has a way with his writing that makes incongruity seem trivial when you meet and engage with his incredibly potent ideas, expressed in beautifully streamlined prose. To