Book 16 of 26 books for 2024! Still aiming for 20.

There’s a series of works published by Orion Publishing Group known as SF Masterworks, and it has been going since 1999 and so far has nearly two hundred unique titles. As the name suggests, the books are all classic works of science fiction, and though the list includes many famous titles, it also includes works of lesser-known authors, and it has been a joy to discover some really excellent books through the series.

The one that most recently caught my eye was Raft, by Stephen Baxter, which was his debut novel, first published in 1991 and expanded from a short story he wrote in 1989. The SF Masterworks edition was published in 2018.

The premise of the novel is a fascinating one, and the elevator pitch goes something like this: Some 500 years ago, a spaceship from Earth accidentally passed into a parallel universe where the force of gravity is a billion times greater than in our universe. The force largely tore their massive ship to pieces, and now the descendants of the original survivors live on small “islands” of matter, eking out an existence trading with each other. There is the Raft, the main hub of civilization, built around the ruins of the original starship, and there is the Belt, a ring of habitations orbiting around a small burned out star from which they extract precious iron. These habitations reside within a nebula filled with air, meaning that humans can travel without life support between destinations; this travel is done on flying trees native to the nebula.

Rees has lived his whole life as a miner on the Belt, prevented from traveling to the Raft due to the strict class hierarchy of their society. He has always been curious and clever, however, so when a chance to escape does arise, he takes it, going in search of answers to a question that has haunted him — why is the nebula dying, and what can humanity do to save itself?

The central idea of the novel — that this is a universe where gravity is a billion times stronger than in Earth’s universe — is a catchy one, and the idea that motivated me to read the book in the first place. But could Baxter build that concept into an interesting and compelling story? In my opinion, he certainly has! The book reads, in a sense, like a very strange fantasy novel — the heightened gravity allows for the surreal visions of people living on floating islands of metal and traveling around on trees that twirl their branches like propellers. There are many other interesting observations related to the heightened gravity that I ate up as a physicist, such as the tiny size of stars and their correspondingly short lifespans. The novel is very reminiscent of the speculative hard science of the golden age of science fiction, where authors like Clarke and Asimov pushed the boundaries of imagination as to what could be possible.

The characters and society of the Raft also make for very compelling storytelling. Humans are always human, and Rees encounters many obstacles in people and traditions in his eventual effort to save these remnants of humanity. The book took several unexpected twists, and ended with a climax that was extremely satisfying, creative, and worth the time it took to get there. (And the final scene of the book is also a delight.)

I will need to look up more books by Baxter now. He’s a well-known name in science fiction, but I am not particularly well-versed in science fiction, so I haven’t really encountered his work before. Raft is a really enjoyable novel that makes me eager to see what else he has concocted. (Along with novels done jointly with Terry Pratchett.)