Book Review – Raft – Stephen Baxter

This is another of the armful of old Science Fiction novels I bought at the used book store (Valley Wild Books in Littleton, MA).

This is the debut novel of Stephen Baxter who has gone on to have an award winning career in science fiction.  This is the second debut novel I caught in my armful net.

I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not producing some randomized, statistical test of used science fiction books probabilities.  Maybe I should build a spreadsheet and do some pivot tables on the results?  Answer compelling questions like ‘If a person randomly grabs a dozen old sci-fi novels from a used book store, what is the probability of debut novels?’

Put a little science into the process, (and here comes the clever transition), just like Stephen Baxter followed the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke and put hard science into his alternate universes.

This novel, Raft, is a hard science fiction novel published in 1991 and based on previously written short story Baxter wrote.

It is the story of the descendants of a human spaceship that gets trapped in an alternate universe where the laws of gravity are quite different.  They live on the ‘raft’ which is the remnant of the spaceship and survive in a pocket nebula of oxygen.

The driving conceit of the story plays with a universe where the gravitational constant is millions of times larger than in our own universe, creating things like stars with short life spans that turn into cooled kernels that can be mined.

He also mixes in the emergence of classes and underclasses in the surviving humans – sort of a nebula Lord of the Flies.

The big conflict is that the nebula is collapsing, and they need to find a way to get out.  While at the same time fighting the social recidivism of the deniers.

Stephen Baxter was of that generation of writers that cared about hard science.  He was a hard scientist himself.  He went on to be an award-winning science fiction writer and part of the organizing forces around science fiction in general.

This story and book were indirectly part of his Xeelee sequence of multiple novels and stories around human expansion into the universe over millions of years.

I have to be honest.  I did not find the story that compelling.  As a first novel I guess it was a great indicator of things to come, but to me it felt a bit unpolished and all over the place.  This often happens when a short story with one good idea i.e. ‘What if we play with the gravitational constant?’ tries to expand into a full-blown novel.  The characters and situations around that core idea feel a bit shoe horned.

This was not uncommon at the time.  Many authors broke into the business with stories, which then expanded into novels and into series, like an athlete working their way through the minor leagues.

If you like old science fiction and that particular brand of hard science fiction, then Raft may be worth a read.

Chris Russell

ChrisRussellAuthor dot com