Last And First Contacts: v. 2: Imaginings (edition 2012)

Stephen Baxter's great. I love his novels, but it's in his short stories where he gets to play with the big ideas for just as long as he needs to in order to tell a story. So each one feels like a nice, neat shot of Baxter. ( )

I am slowly working my way through Baxter’s large list of novels and have for the most part really enjoyed all that I have read but up till now I had not read any of his short stories. Each of these stories has an idea or world that has been created that could probably have supported a novel but are just as brilliant in their small form and even though they only took a short amount of time to read individually it took me quite a long time to finish the collection because I wanted time to think about the stories afterwards and so left long gaps between readings.

Stand out tales for me were “Children of Time” with its long strides across “history” the brilliant “Pacific Mystery” and the ultra brief but very cool “The Long Road” that I really would be interested in seeing in a longer form which I suppose is quite weird seeing that a road is the main character!

It should, however be noted that some of these stories, especially two of my favourites “Children of Time” and “The Long Road” will be almost familiar to people who have read Olaf Stapledon (as admitted fully by Baxter himself) and even Baxters own work, especially Evolution but having hugely enjoyed both these authors work I don’t personally find that disappointing in any way.

Erstkontakt ***
In the abyss of time ***
Halo Ghosts ****
Tempest 43 ****
The Children of Time *****
The Pacific Mystery *****
No More Stories ***
Dreamers' Lake****
The Long Road *****
Last Contact ****

LAST & FIRST CONTACTS: 4 ( )

A collection of mostly recent short stories by Baxter. A good number of the stories cover Baxter's familiar territory of vast sweeps of time and the fate of humanity as a minor part of a large universe. My favorites in here were "The Children of Time" (human survival over the next billion years), "The Pacific Mystery" (alternate history with a rift in the middle of the Pacific that prevents circumnavigation of the globe), "Last Contact" (cosmic inflation leads to the end of the universe", and "In the Abyss of Time" (time travel to the end of time). Some of the other stories are fairly minor, but the whole collection is worth reading. ( )

I enjoyed these stories for the most part, but most of them were pretty depressing. A lot of them deal with the end of the universe and/or life as we know it (or life at all). Many of them describe the same event happening throughout history, no matter what advances humanity has made in the meantime. A lot of them were pretty bleak. Quite of few of them describe the kinds of stretches of time that diminish the lifetime of our sun to the blink of an eye, and that just gets me thinking things like "what's the point to life if time is so huge anyway?"

The stand out stories for me in this collection were The Pacific Mystery and Last Contact. I enjoyed the first because I do love a steampunky-alternate-history with a spunky heroine. If you liked Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, you might like this one. I enjoyed the latter because I enjoyed the contrast between the extremely serious subject matter and the mundane day-to-day things that just continued on through the course of the story. If you enjoyed PD James's Children of Men it would be worth your time to read this one as well. ( )

The title Last and First Contacts is a play on Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Stapledon's influence is evident in several of the stories in this collection. I enjoyed the sweeping cosmological scale against which pieces like "In the Abyss of Time" are set, but also the more intimate atmosphere of some of the other stories.

I hadn't read anything by Baxter before, but his style here struck me as something of a throwback to an earlier, classical (?) form of "situational" sci-fi, where the emphasis lies more on the exploration of a core concept than on the resolution of the action ... very much along the lines of Arthur C. Clarke's Odyssey or Rama books. That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself; I quite enjoy that style. In this collection, however, several of the stories ended with me thinking, "Yes, and ...?" There seemed to be a final beat missing. This was more of a problem in the first half of the book, notably in "Erstkontakt" and "Halo Ghosts".

Several elements and concepts surfaced repeatedly across different stories: (inhuman) consciousness and intelligence, indistinctly seen aliens, journeying, Nazis, stromatolites, and religion (specifically, Catholicism). I was pleased to see the latter treated gently, given how religious belief is so frequently ridiculed in modern science fiction.

All in all, this collection was a bit of a mixed bag. My favorites were "Last Contact" and "The Pacific Mystery", while "No More Stories" hit the other end of the spectrum. ( )