I can't be the only fan of this master of hard-SF on UMSF...

I liked Titan and Voyage...but not so fond of the others..bit too obscure for me

Doug

I haven't read any of his hard SF - or at least the two of his books that I have read (The Time Ships and Evolution) were interesting concepts but neither struck me as hard SF. I can see literary reasons for writing a sequal to The Time Machine but I could never shake the feeling that it wasn't quite right - it feels decidedly weird for a book written in the 1990's. I found something similar with Evolution - its premise felt a bit over-stretched and it never grabbed me convincingly.

I might just have been having a bad week though and would welcome any suggestions on his work that are better representatives of his hard SF style. I have to admit though that while I am a major fan of SF I am severely biased towards the modern crop of British SF and have a hard time with some of the acclaimed masters (M. John Harrison for example - I read Light and honestly cannot understand what the acclaim is for).

I liked his first novel, 'Raft'. The protagonists are humans who have accidently travelled to a different universe -- one with a gravitational constant one billion times stronger than in our universe.

Bill

I'll put my hand up here and admit to being an absolutely huge fan of Mr Baxter. "VOYAGE" and "TITAN" are books I read again and again; IMHO, the closing scenes in VOYAGE, when the first astronaut sets foot on Mars, are the most thrilling and moving depictions of that historic event I've ever read (and I've read a LOT of those!

I agree that "THE TIME SHIPS" is hard going, a very head-scratching read, so if you want something a bit more space opera-y then you should definitely read "EXULTANT". Can't recommend it highly enough. It has everything - time travel paradoxes, Battlestar Galactica style space dogfights, a sightseeing tour of the centre of the Milky Way...

Can also recommend "MOONSEED", a good old-fashioned disaster novel, set in Edinburgh.

There's a book of short stories available too, called "PHASE SPACE" I think, with some cracking tales in it.

Probably my favorite author... I thought "Ring," "Evolution," and "Vacuum Diagrams" were among his best.

Found a new Stephen Baxter story here, if anyone's interested... Bit gloomy, but so many of his are!