From the Bookshelf: Raft
Sep. 23rd, 2019 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I’ve happened on volumes of the British “SF Masterworks” reprint series, I’ve seemed to find myself either looking at books I already have other editions of or thinking I know just enough about the titles they don’t grab me. Finding copies of Raft by Stephen Baxter in a large used-and-remaindered bookstore, though, was happening on a third category at last. I’d known it to be one of Baxter’s early novels; the introduction by Alastair Reynolds in this edition explained it to be Baxter’s first, establishing themes he’d keep developing in later works (a number of which I’ve read).
The story is set in a universe where, as the back cover explains, “the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know.” A book about stellar nucleosynthesis I read not that long ago mentioned near the end that “if gravity were just ten times stronger than it actually is,” a star equivalent to our sun would fuse all its fuel in ten million years, not ten billion. Baxter’s thought experiment has mile-wide stars burning out in about a year. It might be an abstract exercise save for the science fictional element of a human starship having managed to fall into this universe by accident. Its crew’s descendants (who exert noticeable gravitational pulls on each other; this is played up a bit as a different sort of “attraction”) inhabit a breathable nebula; the viewpoint character, Rees, begins as a young miner scraping iron from a burnt-out star forty-five metres wide to be carried away by flying trees. He just happens to have some curiosity about an environment everyone else just seems to accept, and in wondering about the old tales the red sky used to be blue (even as there are intimations the air is getting harder to breathe) he decides to stow away on a tree and travel to the heart of his miniature civilization, the “Raft”...
A comparative handful of people hanging on with relict technology from a more advanced time, recapitulating social stratification and impending class war all the same even amidst strange surroundings, felt familiar enough from my experience of Baxter’s later works. Rees’s journey through society and wider space alike was an effective enough way to show things off, familiar from more than just one author’s creations. There was one small moment where I started thinking of Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (even as I also remembered a moment in a later work by Baxter), although that earlier book was perhaps less conventional about “science” being the sure way to understand and survive in a strange universe.
“Hard science fiction” sometimes seems a double-edged sword; there were a few moments where I wondered if all of Baxter’s extrapolations were rigorous, although the strongest feeling came from a ghoulish revelation later in the book that had more to do with ecology than physics. I also have to admit that after taking note of a woman introduced in the first chapter in a position of some authority, I didn’t seem to notice many other female characters. These are small criticisms all the same. I suppose Raft is just “new to me,” but I certainly didn’t mind reading a science fiction novel I hadn’t read before.
The story is set in a universe where, as the back cover explains, “the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know.” A book about stellar nucleosynthesis I read not that long ago mentioned near the end that “if gravity were just ten times stronger than it actually is,” a star equivalent to our sun would fuse all its fuel in ten million years, not ten billion. Baxter’s thought experiment has mile-wide stars burning out in about a year. It might be an abstract exercise save for the science fictional element of a human starship having managed to fall into this universe by accident. Its crew’s descendants (who exert noticeable gravitational pulls on each other; this is played up a bit as a different sort of “attraction”) inhabit a breathable nebula; the viewpoint character, Rees, begins as a young miner scraping iron from a burnt-out star forty-five metres wide to be carried away by flying trees. He just happens to have some curiosity about an environment everyone else just seems to accept, and in wondering about the old tales the red sky used to be blue (even as there are intimations the air is getting harder to breathe) he decides to stow away on a tree and travel to the heart of his miniature civilization, the “Raft”...
A comparative handful of people hanging on with relict technology from a more advanced time, recapitulating social stratification and impending class war all the same even amidst strange surroundings, felt familiar enough from my experience of Baxter’s later works. Rees’s journey through society and wider space alike was an effective enough way to show things off, familiar from more than just one author’s creations. There was one small moment where I started thinking of Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (even as I also remembered a moment in a later work by Baxter), although that earlier book was perhaps less conventional about “science” being the sure way to understand and survive in a strange universe.
“Hard science fiction” sometimes seems a double-edged sword; there were a few moments where I wondered if all of Baxter’s extrapolations were rigorous, although the strongest feeling came from a ghoulish revelation later in the book that had more to do with ecology than physics. I also have to admit that after taking note of a woman introduced in the first chapter in a position of some authority, I didn’t seem to notice many other female characters. These are small criticisms all the same. I suppose Raft is just “new to me,” but I certainly didn’t mind reading a science fiction novel I hadn’t read before.