Amph The Stephen Baxter Appreciation Thread

I am currently about 3/4 of the way through Stephen Baxter's Evolution and am enjoying it immensely. For those who don't know this British author, a bibliography of his books can be found here. I also enjoyed Voyage, though it has been awhile since I read it.

Do we have any other Baxter fans here?

 

Never heard of him... what kind of premises do the books have? And is he an older author, or pretty modern?

 

I have read Voyage and Titan. Actually I read Voyage twice, and I liked it a lot, although it also makes me annoyed at the NASA we have today compared to the NASA of the alternate history he has.

Titan I didn't really care for. Space Shuttle to Titan? I don't know. And the characters were all kind of annoying. Nothing interesting is actually found on Titan when they do get there, until the bizare ending.

Voyage though, very good.

Sith Lord Gunray, he is a modern author, and the books of his I have read are the sort that involve realistic science stuffs being used to create some sort of crazy but reasonable space mission. Voyage is an alternate history story in which NASA sends a manned mission to Mars in the 1980's, and from what I can tell everything in it is perfectly reasonable and would have perhaps even been possible. Titan is a story that takes place a little bit in the future in which NASA uses up the remainder of the Space Shuttle fleet to launch a manned mission to Titan, in which astronauts are crammed into a space shuttle for about 5 years and become rather cranky, and then China tries to kill everybody on Earth, and everybody in the book is lame.

However I think some of his other books are more un-sciencey in nature and have something to do with the very far future and humans dealing with a variety of space creatures.

 

I finished Evolution and it was really good. Basically it traced the rise and fall of mankind through to the end of Earth by following particular creatures/pre-humans/humans at certain points in time. For example, one part dealt with a small shrew-like creature (a distant ancestor of man) that was alive when the dinosaurs died. The event that lead to the death of the dinosaurs was pretty gripping in its description. The book lags a bit in places but on the whole I enjoyed it.