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Flux door Stephen Baxter
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Flux (editie 1995)

door Stephen Baxter (Auteur)

Reeksen: Xeelee Sequence (3)

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602838,928 (3.58)8
Star humans were engineered to exist within the mantle of a star, mere tools of their Earth-evolved makers in a war against the Xeelee, owners of the universe. Stephen Baxter's third novel in his magnificent Xeelee Sequence is an exotic and endearing story of an abandoned people. Abandoned to their fate, their history lost along with contact with their makers, Star people survive in an environment that is possibly the strangest in science fiction. Microscopic inhabitants of superfluid air above a Quantum Sea and below the tangled Crust of the Star, swimming in an electric-blue grid, the Magfield, which is subject to violent storms, Star people struggle, like us, to make sense of their world... and the threat hanging over it. Though the truth is far more disturbing and ominous than they feared, they will confront, finally, their makers, and they will rebel against the purpose for which they were created.… (meer)
Lid:BookHavenAZ
Titel:Flux
Auteurs:Stephen Baxter (Auteur)
Info:Harper Voyager (1995), 416 pages
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Trefwoorden:SF

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Flux door Stephen Baxter

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review of
Stephen Baxter's Flux
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 6-19, 2021

For the entire review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1371277-upflux

As far as I remember, I've only read & reviewed Baxter's The Time Ships so far - this, then, being the 2nd bk I read by him. The Time Ships continues H.G. Wells's The Time Machine & I very much enjoyed it for that. In my review of The Time Ships I wrote:

"On the back cover of the edition of The Time Ships that I have, the author is referred to as "today's most acclaimed new "hard SF" author, and the acknowledged heir to the visionary legacy of Wells, Heinlein, and Clarke". That might be in a parallel universe b/c I don't recall hearing about him until I got this bk, wch was published in 1995. Of course, I don't know EVERYTHING, just every other thing. Regardless, the notion of the multiverse wasn't postulated in MY universe until the mid-20th century so it's things like that that make this different from Wells's original The Time Machine. I admit, I wd've settled for the Time Traveller going back to the same future, finding Weena, & fucking her brains out w/ explicit description — but I can't fault Baxter for making the bk be an epic exploration of possibilities that cd be scientifically hypothetized way back in the 1990s before everyone had cell-phones & the world completely changed all over again." - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1106360-baxter

& there's a similar review on the back of this bk. I'd certainly give the author credit for having a wonderful imagination & pursuing it in significant detail. One thing that particularly interests me about him is the following from the 1st inside page:

"Stephen Baxter applied to become an astronaut in 1991. He didn't make it, but achieved the next best thing by becoming a science fiction writer"

There's nothing like a little imminent disaster to get a novel off to a good start:

"Dura scrambled across the Magfield flux lines to the Net. Men, women and older children were gathered in tight huddles, their thin bodies bumping together as the floated in the turbulent Magfield, laboring at the Net. They cast fearful, distracted glances at the approaching vortex instabilities, and from all around the Net Dura could hear muttered or shouted prayer-chants, pleas for the benevolence of the Xeelee." - p 12

Have you ever thought about the closeness of "pleas" & "please"?

This is a future in wch the birth canal has been engineered to not be such a problem child:

"Dia's pelvis was hinged; with the birth so close the cartiledge locking the two segments of the pelvis together would have dissolved into Dia's blood, leaving her pelvis easily opened. Her birth canal and vagina were already stretching, gaping wide. Everything was working together to allow the baby's head easy passage from the womb to the Air. It's easy, Dura thought. And it's easy because the Ur-humans designed it to be easy, maybe even easier than for themselves..." - p 21

"That wasn't a surprise, of course. Every kid learned at his mother's breast how the Ur-Humans had come from somewhere far away – a place much better than this, of course; Adda suspected every human on every world grew up believing that – and had left children here to grow, to be strong, and to join the community of mankind one day, all under the beneficial and all-too-abstract gaze of that multiple God, the Xeelee." - p 26

"Star Humans are microscopic, but their hopes and fears, and loves, are not. And the future of humans everywhere, on Earth and among the stars, depends on their courage in the face of attack by the mighty Xeelee, owners of the universe." - back cover

Hence the stage is set for a whole series of novels by Baxter (apparently this is the 3rd of them, wch I didn't realize, so the stage has long-since been set).

"Farr looked up.

"Leaves – six of them arranged in a neat, symmetrical pattern – hung down just above his head. With a surge of absurd gratitude Farr pulled himself up into the darkness beyond the leaves.

"A branch about the thickness of his waist and coated with slick-dark wood led from the leaf into a misty, blue-glowing darkness above him . . . no, he thought, that was the wrong way round; somewhere up there was the trunk of the tree, suspended from the Crust, and from it grew this branch, and from that in turn grew the leaves which faced the Sea." - pp 30-31

One of the most impressive things about this novel for me is Baxter's ability to describe a world so different from our own biomorphically & consistently. In the above case, the 'upside-downess' of it: the "Human Beings" exist in the air, the grounded objects are over their heads, the "Sea" is NOT a body of water, etc.. It was fun adjusting to imagining the described environment.

"The tree trunk she'd followed had broadened only gradually, at last reaching a width just too great for her to stretch her arms around. Now, suddenly, the clean lines of the trunk exploded into a complex tangle of roots which formed a semi-circular platform over her head. Peering up, she could see the roots receding into the dim translucent interior of the Crust itself" - p 44

Keeping in mind that the "Human Beings" are microscopic in contrast to ourselves what these "trees" consist of is unknown to me.

"'Let's have a little lesson. Why do you think the leaves are so tasty?'

"Farr thought about that. 'Because they're sull of protons.'

"Dura nodded seriously. 'Near enough. Actually they are laced with protein-rich isotopes – of krypton, strontium, zirconium . . . even a little heavy iron. Each nucleus of krypton, for instance, has a hundred and eighteen protons, while the tin nuclei of our bodies have just fifty each. And our bodies need protons for their fuel.'" - pp 32-33

What's a proton?

"Proton, stable subatomic particle that has a positive charge equal in magnitude to a unit of electron charge and a rest mass of 1.67262 × 10−27 kg, which is 1,836 times the mass of an electron.

"Protons, together with electrically neutral particles called neutrons, make up all atomic nuclei except for the hydrogen nucleus (which consists of a single proton). Every nucleus of a given chemical element has the same number of protons. This number defines the atomic number of an element and determines the position of the element in the periodic table. When the number of protons in a nucleus equals the number of electrons orbiting the nucleus, the atom is electrically neutral."

- https://www.britannica.com/science/proton-subatomic-particle

Can we eat protons? According to Jerzy Michal Pawlak, ex particle physicist, on Quora:

"Free protons would be very difficult to eat, because as charged particles they strongly repel each other, so you can’t even easily gather a macroscopic amount of free protons without adding electrons to keep the protons together. And if you add electrons but insist that they don’t bind to the protons, the protons are still free, then technically you have what we call plasma. Eating hot plasma (at thousands Kelvins) is definitely unhealthy.

"Free neutrons present another difficulty: they don’t bind together and are not easily confined by matter. So it would not be easy to eat them. And unadvisable: free neutrons are radioactive, which is unhealthy, and they also bind easily to atomic nuclei inside your body, making those nuclei radioactive. Unhealthy!

"The way to go is to allow protons bind with neutrons into stable nuclei, and also add electrons to the mix, to balance the positive charge of the protons and also make the nuclei bind into molecules, and molecules into liquid or solid state, easy to eat. Some combinations of protons, neutrons and electrons are really yummy, and some others are healthy :)"

- https://www.quora.com/Can-we-eat-neutron-and-protons

Scale is a matter of recurring presence & interest.

"Mansheights? he thought, distracted. A practical measure, he supposed . . . but what was wrong with microns? A mansheight would be about ten microns – a hundred-thousandth of a metre – if it meant what it sounded like . . ."

Hence, these "Human Beings" wd be about 150,000th of our height.

"She tried to keep her voice steady. 'I think so. I'm just a little taken aback by the speed of this thing, I suppose.'

"He frowned and squinted out through his window. 'We're not going so fast. Maybe a metre an hour.[']" - p 74

"'Do you know how big the City is? Ten thousand mansheights, from side to side. And that's not counting the Spine.' The little car continued to edge its way, cautiously, around the City, like a timid Air-piglet looking for a place to suckle. Toba shook his head. 'Even the Ur-humans would have been impressed by ten thousand manshieghts, I'll bet. Why, that's almost a centimetre . . .'" - pp 86-87

"Three metres deep.

"It was a depth Dura couldn't comprehend. Humans were confined within the Mantle to a shell of superfluid Air only a few metres thick. Her first journey with Toba to the Pole from the upflux – so far that she had felt she was travelling around the curvature of the Star itself – had only been about thirty metres." - p 257

[Reviewer's note: I often refer to differences between American English & British English. Webster deliberately changed American English to be different from British English, usually more stripped-down: as in the change from colour to color & favour to favor & labour to labor. One of my 'favorites' of these changes is theatre to theater wch creates the immediate problem of how to spell theatrical. Of course, the solution is to just spell it the British way - meaning that the change from theatre to theater really serves no purpose other than gratuitous differentiation. Same for metre to meter. When I was a child, I was taught that when adding a suffix to a word ending in a consonant that the consonant was doubled. Hence travel turned into travelling - as it appears in the above quote from this British author. However, as the Mirriam-Webster online dictionary notes:

"When it comes to spelling the forms of the verb travel, traveled and traveling are more common in the U.S., and travelled and travelling are dominant everywhere else." - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/traveling-vs-travelling-usage

It seems to me that this practice of dropping the doubled consonant in the US has happened in my lifetime but maybe it started way-back-when w/ Webster. Regardless, if you, as a writer, ever get 'corrected' by some pompous creep to one version or another be assured that they have a limited pseudo-knowledge that they shdn't try to impose on anyone else.]

"She frowned and pointed out the second cylinder to Hork. 'What do you think that is? It looks like a fortress. Perhaps the Ur-humans needed to shelter – perhaps they came under attack . . .'

"He was laughing at her, not unkindly. 'No, Dura. You've lost the scale. Look at it again. It's maybe – what ten thousand mansheights tall?'

"'Ten times as big as your glorious Parz City.'

"'Maybe, but that's still only 10 centimetres or so. Dura, the Ur-humans were metres tall. The hand of an Ur-human could have engulfed that cylinder.' He was watching her slyly. 'Do you see it yet? Dura, that's a food vessel. A cup.'

"She stared. A cup, large enough to hold a dozen Parz Cities?

"She tried to keep thinking. 'Well,' she said, 'then it's a damn odd cup. All the food would float out of the top. Wouldn't it?'

"Hork nodded grudgingly. 'You'd think so.' He sighed. 'But then, there are many things about the Ur-humans we can't understand.'" - pp 315-316

&, yes, there's even class in this microscopic world.

"Dura shook her head. 'Folk here don't hunt, Farr. I've learned that much. They grow special kinds of grasses, and eat them.'

"Mixxax laughed bitterly. '"Folk here", as you call them, don't even do that. I do that, in my scrubby farm on the edge of the upflux desert. I grow food to feed the rich folk in Parz . . . and I pay them taxes so they can afford to buy it. And that,' he finished bitterly, 'is how Hork's courtiers have enough leisure time to grow flowers.'" - pp 76-77

& there're even toilets.

"Toba showed the Human Beings a place to clean themselves – a room containing chutes for waste and spherical bowls holding scented cloth. Dura and Farr, left alone in this strange room, tried to use the chutes. Dura pulled the little levers as Tova had shown them, and their shit disappeared down gurgling tubes into the mysterious guts of the City. Brother and sister peered into the chutes, open-mouthed, trying to see where it all went." - p 96

&, of course, where there's class there's servitude.

"The woman was about Dura's age but a good deal plumper; her hair-tubes were elaborately knotted into a gold-and-white bun, and layers of fat showed over her cheekbones. With the air of a professional she peered into the boy's eyecups, ears and nostrils; she bade him open his mouth and ran a finger around his gums, inspecting the scrapings she extracted. Then she poked at Farr's armpits, anus and penis-cache." - p 128

& what about their hypothetical makers?

"'What were they like, the Ur-Humans?'

"'We can't be sure – the Core Wars and the Reformation haven't left us any records – but we do have strong hypotheses, based on scaling laws and analogies with ourselves. Analogous anatomy was my principle subject as a student . . . Of course, that was a long time ago. They were much like us. Or rather, we were made in their image. But they were many times our size – about a hundred thousand times as tall, in fact. Because he was dominated by balances between different sets of physical forces, the average Ur-human was a metre tall, or more.[']" - p 137

& human nature marches on.. even at this microscopic level.

"At last Hosch seemed to exhaust his anger, and he Waved away to some other part of the hopper line. The labourers who had gathered to relish Farr's humiliation – men & women alike – gave up their surreptitious surveillance and, with the smugness of spared victims, fixed their attention back on their work." - p 140

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of this novel is imagining humans, as we currently know ourselves, evolving into creatures capable of miniaturizing a version of ourselves & seeding an environment w/ the miniatures that our currently sized humans wdn't be able to inhabit. Then there's imagining how the replicated human characteristics wd play out under these new conditions.

"Muub was no lover of the great outdoors, but he relished the Garden. He tilted back his stiff neck, looking up into the yellow-gold Air. To be here beneath the arching, sparkling vortex lines of the Pole – and yet securely surrounded by the works of man – was a fulfilling, refreshing experience. It seemed to strengthen his orderly heart that the Garden was an artifact, a museum of tamed nature – but an artifact which stretched for no less than a square centimetre around him . . . The Garden was enough to make one believe that man was capable of any achievement." - p 174

"[']I have asked you to view the Garden today as my guest, as a friendly gesture to one who is new to Parz and who is alone here. But frankly, if you're not prepared to be courteous then you are free to depart.'

"'Oh, I'll behave,' Adda grumbled. 'Though I'll not swallow the pretense that you've done me any sort of favour by treating my injuries. I know very well that you're exacting a handsome price for the labor of Dura and Farr.'

"Muub frowned. 'Ah, your companions from upflux. Yes, I understand they have found indentures.'

"'Slave labour," Adda hissed." - p 175

The clashing of cultures that I've only hinted at in the quotes thickens the plot as the dominant culture decides it may have a need for the wilder ones.

"'Muub, we have to think wider. Beyond the City, even. What about those weird upfluxers you told me about? The old man and his companions . . . curiosities from the wild. The upfluxers are Xeelee cultists, aren't they? Maybe they could tell us something; maybe they have preserved the knowledge we have foolishly destroyed.'" - p 190

For the entire review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1371277-upflux ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
After losing this (half read) on a plane 20 odd years ago it was good to finally finish it and remember that Mr Baxter could write succinct novels and not push them into a trilogy or longer. ( )
  Superenigmatix | Jan 16, 2016 |
I try to read most books without reading the synopsis first, it is more fun discovering the story that way, but for Stephen Baxter’s books this never work out. Baxter has an immense imagination backed by a profound knowledge of science. He is also quite a good storyteller, definitely an ideal combo for writing hard sci-fi… but! I suspect he may find it difficult to conceive how little the layman understand scientific principles that he takes for granted. I imagine he hasn’t been a layman since the age of five or something.

The setting for Flux is even weirder than [b:Raft|100680|Raft (Xelee Sequence, #1)|Stephen Baxter|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1171468835s/100680.jpg|829085], the book is set on a neutron star where microscopic genetically engineered “humans” live in the star’s mantle. These people do not walk around, they move by “Waving” a sort of swimming on magnetic field lines. If I understand correctly there is no gravity as such so nothing ever fall in this book and the concepts of up and down is not as we would experience it. The “humans” do not see, hear, breathe or taste as we do. I don’t really know enough science to explain any of this I am sorry to say. (Hopefully I will some help in the comments).

I have read thousands of science fiction books but I don’t think have read one set on a star before (as opposed to a planet). I had to google stuff about core, mantle and crust to have a better idea of the setting. If your knowledge of science (especially physics) is as limited as mine but you still want to read this book then I suggest you read the synopsis first (on the back of the book, or on Goodreads, Amazon etc.), even then don’t worry too much about understanding the science just let Mr. Baxter tells his story and things will gradually become clearer.

The funny thing is the plot of this book is quite simple to follow. The main theme is basically a struggle to survive and the story eventually becomes about a character’s attempt to save the world (which is a star, not a planet). In contrast to the science the characters’ motivations are extremely easy to understand, this makes it fairly easy to follow the plot.

There is quite a lot of neologism in this book, the odd thing is that they are common words with the first letter capitalized, like Air, Wave, Human Beings etc. The author clearly wants the reader to infer the meanings of these words through the narrative, I have only been partially successful.

Dialog, prose style and characterization are clearly not Baxter’s strong points. The great [a:Arthur C. Clarke|7779|Arthur C. Clarke|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1357191481p2/7779.jpg] had the same weaknesses, except he explained the science behind his fiction much more accessibly in my opinion. That said I think Baxter is a little (not a lot) more successful with character development. These are not wonderful, complex and believable characters you get in a Tolstoy novel but the few central characters are amiable enough. As for the damn Xeelee aliens once again they barely show up, considering Flux is part of the Xeelee Sequence they tend be play very hard to get!

Any way, massively impressive world building backed by real science, likable characters and a good story. Fans of hard sci-fi should enjoy this, especially if their grounding in science is up to snuff. As for me, I quite like it!

So ends my last review of the four volumes from my copy of the Xeelee omnibus edition. Over all it has been a fun if often incomprehensible ride (on the scientific side). There are several other volumes outside of this omnibus in the full Xeelee Sequence which I will probably catch up with sooner or later. ( )
  apatt | Dec 26, 2015 |
A science fiction novel about humans -- or rather, micron-scale beings patterned closely after humans -- living in the mantle of a neutron star. As an imaginative thought experiment, it's kind of a clever idea, as it explores the question of whether life could exist in such an environment, how it might work, and what things would look like if you could enter this kind of weird-physics realm with the right senses to perceive it. Unfortunately, clever or not, it's really not enough to carry a 400 page novel all by itself, and there's just not a whole lot else here. The characters are pretty thin, as is the plot (even if it does widen its scope significantly at the end), and in true hard SF tradition the writing style is at least 85% exposition. I will say that I found it more readable than some other stuff at the extreme end of the hard SF spectrum, where characterization is often not so much thin as painfully bad. Still, it ended up being a bit of a slog for me, and I can't help thinking that it would have worked considerably better as a short story. ( )
1 stem bragan | Jun 12, 2011 |
Kinda my dream book; strange universe, crazy science, epic scope, even a BDO element in the third act. The problems lie mostly in the weak characters, most of whom I couldn't stand, and the minutiae often feels like padding, but the sci-fi aspect is wonderful. It's very much like the first book, Raft, only bigger and better. ( )
  closedmouth | Sep 17, 2010 |
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» Andere auteurs toevoegen (1 mogelijk)

AuteursnaamRolType auteurWerk?Status
Stephen Baxterprimaire auteuralle editiesberekend
Eggleton, BobArtiest omslagafbeeldingSecundaire auteursommige editiesbevestigd

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Star humans were engineered to exist within the mantle of a star, mere tools of their Earth-evolved makers in a war against the Xeelee, owners of the universe. Stephen Baxter's third novel in his magnificent Xeelee Sequence is an exotic and endearing story of an abandoned people. Abandoned to their fate, their history lost along with contact with their makers, Star people survive in an environment that is possibly the strangest in science fiction. Microscopic inhabitants of superfluid air above a Quantum Sea and below the tangled Crust of the Star, swimming in an electric-blue grid, the Magfield, which is subject to violent storms, Star people struggle, like us, to make sense of their world... and the threat hanging over it. Though the truth is far more disturbing and ominous than they feared, they will confront, finally, their makers, and they will rebel against the purpose for which they were created.

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