Vacuum Diagrams, by Stephen Baxter
Fun and mostly clued hard SF, with flaws
(Review posted 30 Sep 2003 13:12:12)

(Originally published elsewhere.)

Right now I'm reading Stephen Baxter's Vacuum Diagrams. It's fun, basically clued SF, a "novel" made by tenuously knitting together a bunch of short stories. My complaints are that the first three (four?) short stories in it all have exactly the same plot (humans find life in some unexpected place out in the solar system), and that he has really strange notions about how much (or actually how little) change will happen in the next thousand years or so.

The stories claim to be set in like 3600 to 3900 (so far), but everything's entirely comprehensible: society and culture and people seem to be exactly like they are now except that we can travel really fast around the solar system. Not alot of ferment in fifteen hundred years! One story is set in 3672 and another in 3948, but they might as well have been happening a week apart; apparently nothing much happened in those 276 years either. This is a problem, considering how much has changed in, say, the last fifteen hundred, or even just 276, years. Maybe Baxter has an explanation for the glacial progress in some other novel, but I dunno. I find myself just assuming that they're all really set in like 2075 or something, and then the problem mostly goes away.