The Thousand Earths

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This human quality is shown through an interesting dichotomy between two religious factions on Mela’s planet, which become more important as the world’s end becomes imminent. It doesn’t help that Mela’s father Tenn is a Perseid, a religion with “a human warmth” determined to do their best for “the Immies”, whilst her estranged mother Salja is a Starrist, believing in “cosmic austerity” and involved in trading property before it disappears into The Tide. (How did those two ever get together?) The Thousand Earths perhaps will not be to everyone's taste. It is quite a long read, and the split narrative is a little unusual. It is still an incredibly intelligent and absorbing read, right from the very start. Never let it be said that Stephen Baxter does stories on a minor scale. His last novel Galaxias (reviewed HERE) dealt with the dimming of the Sun. This time the scope is epic, both in space and time.

I like Stephen Baxter. He does proper SF. I don't necessarily enjoy everything he does, but he has a massive catalog and there are many books of his I do like. I particularly enjoy the Xeelee series as well as the Long Earth books with Terry Pratchett (although that series got a bit tedious in the later books).Much of the first part of the book though seems to be smaller in scale, revolving around the lives of two sisters, Ish & Mela. Told by focussing on Mela, it seems like a fairly typical space colonisation tale, which becomes much vaster when it is revealed that the girls and their parents are on an Earth-like planet surrounded by a thousand (well – 999, I guess) others. Interspersed is the tale of a young woman Mela, whose Iron Age world platform is literally crumbling away at a steady rate, like cliffs falling into the sea each year. Up in her sky are hundreds of other earth-type synthetic worlds, but she can't get there. The unbelievable point is that nobody ever asks if they could go anywhere. Remember Land and Overland? I think someone would be developing space travel but they don't get any further than barges being towed. Baxter's writing style is fluid and engaging, allowing readers to effortlessly navigate the complexities of the multiple narratives and intricate timelines. The depth of his world-building is truly impressive, from the detailed descriptions of each Earth to the intricacies of the scientific principles that underpin the story.

Someone asked me if the book was worth persevering and I said yes, it is, and there's a rush as events telescope. Don't expect a thriller or a romance, it's straight SF and a seat at the world's end. I rarely ever get to read such SF like this. Its focus is equally on both the Ideas and the Human Spirit. I loved the story and it makes me sad that we don't see this kind of serious Big Idea SF anymore. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Stephen Baxter’s work sprawls, narratively, spatially, temporally, conceptually, and cosmologically. He also has a fondness for extravagantly displacing his protagonists and for setting his stories in strange and mysterious environments. And he does love a comprehensive, apocalyptic disaster – see his recent World En­gines: Destroyer or Galaxias. What I find espe­cially interesting is how many ways he manages to reconfigure these motifs, tropes, and options in his latest, The Thousand Earths. But the other storyline has a world slowly shrinking from the margins. The young girl Mela has to grow up knowing the end is only thirty years away. Soon she finds herself leading a group of refugees to the heart of the Empire. Here the characterisation and family dynamics were conveyed well. There was some very interesting world building going on, the fates of the fugitives were well described and for the first time in a Baxter-novel I found a sympathetic treatment of religion (but this remains a hard SF-novel). Without too much preachiness it was also clear the plight of these people could be seen as connected to climate change. As many SF-authors Baxter also has to deal with this in his stories. Stephen Baxter has that innate ability to make what on the surface is seemingly average turn out to be a touch of sheer brilliance. This is basically a two-fold story that eventually blends into a whole.She and her people have always known that this long-predicted end to their home, one of the Thousand Earths, is coming - but that makes their fight to survive, to protect each other, no less desperate . . . and no less doomed. Where it fell down for me was on several key points. Firstly, the length. It reads like a self-pub where the author doesn't yet have the ability to be brutal with cutting out fluff. There was zero need for it to be this long and meandering, both storylines could easily have been cut in half.

My other doubt was not only that humanity could continue as long as Baxter suggests, but also that it would do so with only trivial genetic changes and with a continuity of history over many millions of years. There is one technological MacGuffin to provide some aspects of that continuity, but even so, given the huge changes that have happened in the 200,000 years since Homo sapiens originated, it somehow seems unlikely that humans will be pretty much the same in the far distant future. It’s not unusual for the timescape of a Stephen Baxter novel to span hundreds, thousands, or even millions of years but The Thousand Earths stretches his ambition even further, speculating what might happen to Earth – and the people that live on it – over billions and more. Mela and her family are in turmoil, watching on while the countdown to their planet's collapse continues relentlessly. Helpless and desperate, fighting to survive in a world without hope.I think I would have enjoyed the book more if it was limited to Mela's arc with probably the reasons behind apocalypse explained in discovery form. That would have reduced the length of the book and made it much more readable and a beautiful story. Stephen Baxter has to be one of the most prolific SF authors working today. Hardly had I bought Galaxias when I heard about The Thousand Earths coming out later this year. And then the friendly folks at Orion happily sent me an arc from NetGalley UK on the same day I requested it.