The Grok

Author: Stephen Baxter

Manifold - Origin is the third book in Baxter's Manifold series. The Manifold series attempts to address the infamous Fermi's Paradox. The crux of Fermi's Paradox says that given our understanding of the universe and making reasonable assumptions about it, it is most likely that the reason why we haven't encountered extra terrestrial intelligent species is because there aren't any!

I have never read any of Baxter's novels and this was my first attempt at reading recent science fiction. I thorougly enjoy hard science fiction and my yardstick for measuring them is against Arthur C. Clarke's excellent Space Odyssey series.

Baxter opens the novel with husband and wife, Reid Malenfant and Emma Stoney, who are exploring a suspected UFO report over South Africa. They encounter a blue portal in the sky which sucks in Emma, transferring her to an unknown Red Moon. The Red Moon has appeared out of nowhere and replaced our Moon and even more surprisingly, the blue portal is spewing out naked Neanderthals out of it! Emma finds herself on the unknown Red Moon alongwith another family. The brutal savagery of the Red Moon is revealed, as a man is promptly hacked to death by the beastly residents of the Red Moon.

Baxter doesn't waste much time writing about his characters and some of his characters end up looking stiff and heartless. The extensively detailed depictions of brutality, savagery and life style of the hominid races will put off some readers. However, if you get past half the book, you'll be treading on richer territory of the book. I think Baxter could have dropped some of the objectionable content, but I guess he was intent on driving his point.

The races on the Red Moon are varied and fascinating and the mini adventure tale that revolves around Malenfant's attempt to rescue Emma presents Baxter an opportunity to give the readers a fascinating account of the collage of hominid races. While I didn't enjoy the first half of the book, the second half was spell binding and well written. One thing that you realize while reading the book is that Baxter has purposely made the human characters look weak and vulnerable to demonstrate our minuteness in comparison to the machinery of the universe.

As the book comes to a close, Baxter shines in presenting a plausable explanation for the existence of the Red Moon. Despite the fact that the characters are doomed to a life on the Red Moon and can never return their home planets, I was satisfied with the ending!

Baxter writes good science fiction and if Origin is any indication of his abilities, he has a great future! Origin still falls a bit short of ACC's Odyssey series, mainly because I felt Origin could have been a bit shorter, but it is still one heck of a book!

A must read if you are a fan of hard science fiction novels.

Rating: 4.0 2.5 / 5.0

Update: After reading Manifold - Time I was disappointed by Baxter's lack of originality to Origin. Nearly all of the ideas were discussed in Time (which is brilliant) and it doesn't come to a satisfying ending. You could read this first before starting Time.