hile on a NASA goodwill tour in South Africa, Reid Malenfant gets the news that he's been washed out of an upcoming space station mission. Though its a routine assignment, the astronaut has had only two previous space flights and is angered over the denial for what he feels are political reasons, something about not being a team player. In seeking solace from his troubles, the pilot goes aloft in a T-38 jet trainer borrowed from the South African air force. And he takes his long-suffering wife along with him for the ride.
Emma Stoney is by profession an accountant. But her career—not to mention her life—has always taken second place to that of her husband's single-minded aspirations. So, when a report of a UFO comes in and Malenfant decides to investigate, "she wasn't about to argue; as so often in her relationship with Malenfant, she was, literally, powerless."
This UFO sighting isn't just another weather balloon. It's an enormous blue wheel, about a half-mile across. As if that weren't strange enough, what looks like people are falling out from the portal. At the same time, the moon is somehow replaced by a larger, and as it turns out human-habitated, red globe. Thinking that this may be an actual first contact with aliens from space, Malenfant decides that, the danger of intensifying turbulence notwithstanding, the artifact warrants closer examination because "this changes everything."
Malenfant's reckless approach to the artifact causes his jet to disintegrate. While both occupants manage to eject, Emma is catapulted through the portal and transported to the new Red Moon. This strange larger sphere is wreaking havoc with devastating tidal forces that, among other damage, lay waste to much of Japan.
Malenfant initiates a successful campaign to launch a cheap, quick and dirty trip to the Red Moon. He is assisted by fellow astronaut Nemeto, whose general nature to understand, as much as her Japanese heritage, compel her to discover the cause behind the devastation to their homeland. Malenfant, in archetypal Heinlein hero fashion, is mainly interested in mustering the meager resources of NASA to rescue his wife, who finds herself in a Stone Age world populated by various strains of hominids thought to have permanently fallen off the prehistoric evolutionary tree eons ago. And who also finds that she can survive quite well without her husband, if only because she has little choice about the matter.
Grappling with galactic questions
Stephen Baxter is interested in the big issues, not only the mind-boggling topic of the origins of the universe, but the Fermi Paradox, the famous physicist's contention regarding extraterrestrial life: "If they existed, they would be here." The Manifold trilogy variously mixes up elements of Philip K. Dick, Carl Sagan, Golden Age space adventure, Darwin and the theory of human evolution to come up with some at-times heady speculations about—the immensity of the cosmos notwithstanding—humanity's perhaps not-so-insignificant role.
Each novel takes a different spin on the question, using certain central characters, Malenfant and Emma in particular, to explore alternate "realities." Manifold: Time postulated multiple, co-existing universes that subtly affect one another, in which humanity is a singular entity. In Manifold: Space, the aliens arrive, but their arrival portends another stage in a cosmic cycle of creation and destruction that takes little account of how what is necessary for the preservation of the universe affects the various species that populate it. Manifold: Origin adds a little Edgar Rice Burroughs to the concoction to focus less on cosmic spans and more on the human species and its ability to dictate not only its fate, but the fate of the universe itself.
In one of the many little ironies in this book, it is Emma who rescues Malenfant, though he is ultimately doomed by his own pigheaded ego. That there is something nonetheless admirable about Malenfant's ill-fated obstinacy is just one example of the many marvelous contradictions of the human condition.
Malenfant and Emma share the stage with both a highly evolved gorilla-like race whose minds can literally reshape physical reality, as well as various Neanderthal and other primal hominids. Baxter successfully conveys both the brutality as well as the profundity of the daily lives of humanity's ancestors in a way that suggests they were perhaps not as primitive as over-intellectualized Homo sapiens may think.
