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It's very hard to write SF about the long-term fate and underlying physics of the universe, and I have to admire people like Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, and Gregory Bendford for trying. In comparison, people like Asimov have it easy: it's pretty obvious that intelligent robots, or interplanetary empires, are going to have direct impacts on people's lives, and hooking your story to your SF premise is relatively straightforward (not to say easy, but at least straightforward).
In contrast, it's not at all clear how (or if) the lives of relatively familiar and comprehensible people are ever going to be touched by things like vacuum energy, the balance between "bright" and "dark" matter in the universe, the Everett interpreation of quantum physics, or subtle statistical arguments about how long humanity is likely to exist. The two most common ways this crops up in cosmological SF are [] the author abuses the underlying science, and pictures it touching ordinary lives in the relatively near term (the next few thousand years) in ways that violate the science but let the author get the story told, and [] the author ignores the likely consequences of very long time-scales, and tells us a story about people who are supposedly living thousands or millions (or even billions or trillions) of years from now, but whose lives are pretty much identical to ours today except for the one or two spectacular cosmological things that the author wants to write about. (This latter was my main objection to Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams.)
Both of these things annoy me. They don't necessarily ruin the story entirely, but they annoy me.
Baxter's "Manifold: Time" is a good book, and worth reading if you're into cosmological SF and all. But it does suffer from both of the effects above. Various cool ideas from physics and cosmology are brought in and decently well described, but then bent in ways that the underlying science doesn't really support in order to get them to actually matter to the characters. We're shown enormous sweeps of universal time, with enormous societies stretching into the unimaginable future, but the author's only interest in them is their relationship to the physical phenomena he wants to show off; we get not the tiniest hint that they have any art, or culture, or mystery, or whimsy, or anything else not directly related to the plot.
I have to carp about two places where the science is made to touch human lives in ways that it really can't. The first is the easy one: the book has one of those "some characters go through a fancy super-scientific portal that takes them into a whole bunch of other universes with different physical laws so the author can show off his ideas about how universes with different physical laws might look" scenes. The problem is that the characters take their bodies and clothes and equipment and stuff with them, and once you actually go into a universe with different physical laws (that imply, say, that there are no electrons) things like bodies and clothes and equipment and stuff tend to change in inconvenient ways; you really can't have the characters in their space suits floating there next to their portal and saying "ooh, look, in the universe we're in now the laws don't allow charged particles to exist", because, well...
It does make a really cool scene (much cooler than the actually possible alternative scene where they're viewing the other universes on a computer screen in simulation), but I can't shake off the implausibility.
The other bit of science bending has to do with the Doomsday argument (aka "the Carter Catastrophe"), a cute little statistical argument to the effect that it's unlikely that humanity will last much more than a few hundred more years, based on the observation that if there were ultimately going to be trillions and trillions of humans in the universe, it's really unlikely that you and me would turn out to be two of the first few billion.
I think the argument is in fact invalid (it depends upon a strange notion of consciousnesses being randomly assigned to bodies, roughly, which we have no reason to believe corresponds to reality), but even if it is valid it wouldn't have the effects that it has in this book. In the book people take it very seriously, and it causes massive social unrest. In real life it's hardly being suppressed, but people (quite properly) mostly ignore it, or treat it as an intellectual curiosity.
In the book, the futurologist-types in some unspecified way refine the theory enough to predict the end of humanity to within a few decades (or even, if I'm reading one sentence correctly, within a day), and as the predicted end approaches people look forward to it with anything from eagerness to violence to despair. In real life, the nature of the argument is such that it can't possibly be refined in this way, and the end that it predicts doesn't actually approach. In fact, as each generation of people does the calculation, they'll find that the math tells them that humanity is likely to exist somewhat farther into the future than when the last generation did the math (at least that's how it comes out on the back of my envelope!), and in any case since the argument is purely statistical it can never say that the world is for sure going to end right now. So, again, the science doesn't support the human consequences that the author wants to draw from it.
(Oh, and finally, at the end of the book, the author wants us to believe that the ultimate fate of Mind in the Universe is something that is just as vulnerable to the Doomsday Argument as humanity was at the start of the book. But he either doesn't notice, or just doesn't mention, the fact.)
In a way this criticism is unfair; I don't know myself how to write a book that stays true to these cool scientific and philosophical ideas, while at the same time giving them enough direct human impact that we care about them. Until a book like that comes along (and I'll try to remember to let you know if that happens), you could do worse than Manifold: Time.
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