Vacuum Diagrams - BoundCovers

No cover — Stephen Baxter: Vacuum Diagrams (2009, HarperCollins Publishers Limited)

English language

Published 2009 by HarperCollins Publishers Limited.

ISBN:: 978-0-00-736169-4

(1 review)

"And everywhere the Humans went, they found life..."This dazzling future history, winner of the 2000 Philip K. Dick Award, is the most ambitious and exciting since Asimov's classic Foundation saga. It tells the story of Humankind -- all the way to the end of the Universe itself.Here, in luminous and vivid narratives spanning five million years, are the first Poole wormholes spanning the solar system; the conquest of Human planets by Squeem; GUTships that outrace light; the back-time invasion of the Qax: the mystery and legacy of the Xeelee, and their artifacts as large as small galaxies; photino birds and Dark Matter; and the Ring, where Ghost, Human, and Xeelee contemplate the awesome end of Time.Stephen Baxter is the most acclaimed and accomplished of a brilliant new generation of authors who are expanding the vision of science fiction and taking itto a new golden age.

7 editions

Will Sargent reviewed Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter

Review of 'Vacuum Diagrams' on 'Storygraph'

1 star

This is a collection of short stories with an incredibly lame bridging mechanism that strains credibility all by itself... and oh dear god it gets worse as you keep reading.

It's science used with all the exaggerated care and concern of a man using tipex on his computer screen for the very first time. His short story in which "evolution" is the punchline is astonishing not just in its sheer wrongheadedness, but also in the implication in the story that this is a very clever ending and very clever people are impressed by it. By the very end of the series of stories, you realize that this isn't an attempt at science, but magic dressed up as science. The Similarion, only with lasers and the Maiar as quantum lattice foam.

But the stories are trite and predictable when they aren't boneheaded. The writing is terrible. The characters are there to …

This is a collection of short stories with an incredibly lame bridging mechanism that strains credibility all by itself... and oh dear god it gets worse as you keep reading.

It's science used with all the exaggerated care and concern of a man using tipex on his computer screen for the very first time. His short story in which "evolution" is the punchline is astonishing not just in its sheer wrongheadedness, but also in the implication in the story that this is a very clever ending and very clever people are impressed by it. By the very end of the series of stories, you realize that this isn't an attempt at science, but magic dressed up as science. The Similarion, only with lasers and the Maiar as quantum lattice foam.

But the stories are trite and predictable when they aren't boneheaded. The writing is terrible. The characters are there to advance the plot and may as well have the relevant tropes stamped on to their foreheads. And by the time you get to the end of the book, you wonder how on Earth something so dated and parochial (seriously, humans? Made of flesh? At the end of the universe?) could stand up as a theory and you're waiting for the wizard to pull away the curtain and...

...nope. It really is that dumb.