Moonseed

An excellent yarn and susprisingly good point of view narrative that doesn't jump so much, and sticks to the main chap pretty well. If you read the later Manifold Time/Space books this will seem a little familiar in places, with ongoing Baxter themes (the world uniting to get into space to avert disaster, terraforming the moon, earth travelogue, weird stuff going on in the solar system, big alien stuff that 'might not be evil'). Still, if you like hard SF, mixed with the geo-political intrigue, conflict, and will he/won't she ... along with all that quantum what's up ... it's great stuff. Baxter is really doing some great stuff, but his next hard SF books are going to have to come up with some new plot devices :)

I read half the jacket before I forced myself to stop; it was hard because it was so interesting. I'm sorry I read so much because this is definately the worst jacket I've seen. Though some of its excitement was spoiled, I'm not sorry at all for taking out this book and am looking forward to reading more of Stephen Baxter's books. This book is very good, ranking up among my very favorites of Clarke, Asimov, and Heinlein. Highly recommended.

Stephen Baxter is one of my favourite authors, and Moonseed did not fail! A great story - great characters - wonderful technical details - can't wait to read it again!

As a kid in the sixties, I was in love with space and dreamed of being a pilot and an astronaut (too bad you needed 20/20 vision for a shot at this). This book brought back those dreams for me. Once you accept the "moonseed" premise (the nano-tech robots of an ancient interstellar probe, programmed to build solar sails out of any material they find, unfortunately including the earth!), the rest of the book feels just right: realistic, gritty, and believable. The geology, the physics, the space flight engineering -- all are carefully researched and folded skillfully into the story. Even the geology seemed interesting (I learned a lot!). The characters are well-drawn, believable, complex people with plenty of faults (BTW, a key character, a volcanologist, is Japanese -- there really is no racism in this book -- though the Irish child-molestor living as a monk in Japan is a random and rather pointless element, IMO -- women have many important roles in this book, and it just seems natural, people doing their jobs). There is a LOT of stuff in this book, from nanotechnology to terra-forming, in addition to the geology and high-energy physics and space flight. I was totally immersed in this world, caring about the characters and worrying about the fate of mankind. Baxter even describes the smells and the sounds of space flight -- as well as eating, toilet procedures, and yes, even microgravity sex.I'm only an occasional SF reader these days, and this was my first by Baxter. If Voyage and Titan are even better than this, I'll be reading those soon. This is an excellent book.

Have you heard the latest? Deep space probes are bringing star dust back to earth so scientists can find out more about the origins of the universe... No, this is not the plot of Stephen Baxter's book "Moonseed" but it is taken from real science news. Baxter's idea of the danger to Earth (and other planets) originating from samples of moon rocks popped into my mind when I heard the above newscast. Let's just hope that Baxter's story will not come true. "Moonseed" is as fact driven as "Voyager" and "Titan" were and makes it hard to put the book down. The characters are built up slowly, then are integrated flawlessly into the storyline. The spiritual context is something new, and this book keeps the technological discussions and explanations at a minimum. The ending promises hope, even though the time slip is tremendous compared to the incredibly slow build-up up to the last couple of chapters.