I picked up Stephen Baxter's latest novel World Engines: Destroyer after a very positive review in the Guardian. Sadly the book didn't live up to it's promise despite having an agreeably interesting premise.
Astronaut Reid Malenfant awakes in his own far future. His body has been in cold storage since a shuttle accident which killed his co-pilot. Malenfant's own partner Emma Stoney had also been killed exploring Mars' moon Phobos. He is awakened because, impossibly, several hundred years into their mutual futures, Earth has received a message from Stoney.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel is that Malenfant awakes in a future that he cannot understand and which cannot, for the most part, accept him. His brash ways are incompatible with the slow moving life of a post-scarcity, post-space age society. In fact, he is only useful really, for being willing to try and visit Phobos to find out what is happening there and because of the threat to Earth from a rogue planet.
Arriving at Phobos with a motley crew of rejects, Malenfant and his companions discover that the moon is a gateway to a whole number of different universes, each with a "jonbar hinge" that makes them subtly different. In one Russia and the US engaged in major nuclear war, in another Britain stayed out of the Second World War and let Hitler and Stalin slug it out with nuclear weapons. Characters and crews from this travel to Malenfant's timeline and visit the outer solar system to try and understand what's taking place there.
The problem is that the book really isn't up to the interesting premises. All the characters, without exception, are extremely annoying. The British crew are such caricatures that I wondered if the author had ever met anyone from Britain. Malenfant and the people from his own timeline are so annoying I kept hoping they'd be pulled slowly into a massive black hole, though it would have to be massive indeed to overcome the gravity of Malenfant's own massive ego.
From around page 300 there are indications that the only reason the next 300 or so pages exist is to set up the sequels. There are subplots that make no sense (what's the can of Cola about?) and pages upon pages of exposition about technology that are boring and unnecessary.
The most interesting stuff here receives little or no resolution - specifically the nature of Phobos. But then the publisher's wouldn't get the profits from another sequel would they?
Unless you're a major fan of Baxter's work I would avoid this.
Related Reviews
Baxter and Reynolds - The Medusa Chronicles ("Bloody Terrible")
Pratchett & Baxter - The Long Earth ("Quite Disappointing")
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