Jest rok 1885. Przebywający na Granicy Północno-Zachodniej młody dziennikarz, Rudyard Kipling, jest świadkiem niezwykłego spotkania brytyjskich żołnierzy z wytworem nieprawdopodobnie zaawansowanej technologii: unoszącą się w powietrzu kulą, która wydaje się obserwować wszystko wokół. Niebawem zza okolicznego wzgórza wyłania się uszkodzony helikopter z 2037 roku…

This is the third installment in Stephen Baxter’s Manifold trilogy. It sees Manifold regular Reid Malenfant and others once again dealing with possibilities of primate evolution in all forms and grappling with the Fermi Paradox. This time an artifact in the sky transports a select few individuals including Malenfant’s wife to a new red moon which has appeared in place of the moon we know. Blaming himself, Malenfant launches a one man mission to find his wife and solve the Fermi Paradox once and for all.

one world among many…eleven stories about them allWhat if Lincoln never became president, and the Civil War never took place? What if Columbus never discovered America, and the Inca developed a massive, technologicallyadvanced empire? What if magic was real and a half-faerie queen ruled England? What if an author discovered a book written by an alternate version of himself?These are just some of the possible pathways that readers can take to explore the Other Earths that may be waiting just one page away.

What if you could not only travel any location in the world, but to any possible world?We can all imagine such “other worlds”—be they worlds just slightly different than our own or worlds full of magic and wonder—but it is only in fiction that we can travel to them. From The Wizard of Oz to The Dark Tower, from Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass to C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, there is a rich tradition of this kind of fiction, but never before have the best parallel world stories and portal fantasies been collected in a single volume—until now.Review“Anthologist Adams presents readers with a wide variety of alternate Earths, some only slightly askew and others completely unfamiliar. […] Adams’s selections are mirrors reflecting one other with the best images of alternate realities. Readers will greatly enjoy this exploration of our world's foremost and ascendant speculative authors.”—Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)“Reminds longtime readers of fantasy and sci-fi what we love about the genre, while also and aptly demonstrating to newcomers that these stories are about so much more than dragons and multitentacled monsters. It comes highly recommended to both and all.”—Bookgasm

Pierworodni po raz pierwszy dali znać o sobie wywołując Nieciągłość, w wyniku której Ziemia została rozbita na fragmenty pochodzące z różnych epok. Jednym z rozbitków na tak odmienionej planecie, którą nazwano Mirem, była kobieta, imieniem Bisesa Dutt. Z przyczyn, których nie była w stanie zrozumieć, udało jej się nawiązać osobliwy kontakt z zagadkowym artefaktem i kryjącą się za nim potęgą, która odesłała ją z powrotem na Ziemię. Po powrocie odegrała zasadniczą rolę w podjętej przez całą ludzkość próbie powstrzymania katastrofy, potężnej burzy słonecznej, wywołanej przez Pierworodnych, która miała unicestwić wszelkie życie na całej planecie. Groźbie tej udało się wprawdzie zapobiec, ale straty, jakie poniosła Ziemia, były niewyobrażalne.Teraz, w dwadzieścia lat później, Pierworodni wracają. Tym razem zastosowali broń ostateczną: w stronę Ziemi zmierza „bomba kosmologiczna”, urządzenie, którego działania ziemscy naukowcy właściwie nie pojmują i którego nie da się zatrzymać ani zniszczyć. Całemu światu grozi zagłada.Rozpaczliwie poszukując ratunku, Bisesa udaje się na Marsa, a następnie na Mir, którego koniec także jest bliski. Ale kiedy wychodzą na jaw szokujące cechy natury Pierworodnych i ich mrożące krew w żyłach plany dotyczące rodzaju ludzkiego, z odległych o wiele lat świetlnych otchłani kosmosu przybywa nieoczekiwany sprzymierzeniec.

Akcja powieści toczy się na planecie zamieszkanej przez maleńkie istoty, których biologia całkowicie różni się od ludzkiej. Jednak ich uczucia, marzenia i lęki są takie same jak każdej istoty ludzkiej. Pewnego dnia stają oni do walki z — w ich wyobrażeniu — bogami, tzw. Xeelee. Tylko od ich wytrwałości i hartu ducha zależy, czy przetrwają nasilające się ataki na ich słońce.

Are you sure this didn’t almost happen?

Five hundred years after a handful of human starship travelers got lost in a hostile universe, their descendants are still struggling for survival. As hard as life is on The Raft — a platform remnant of the ship’s hull — it’s even harder in The Belt — a string of shacks circling the iron-rich core of a dead star. Every Belter has heard the story of the legendary starship but most of them don’t believe it. But Rees, a lowly mine-rat, does. He wonders why the sky is angry red instead of the blue his parents remembered. Why food from The Raft gets less and less nutritious. Why fewer and fewer stars form every day. In his quest to find answers, Rees travels from boyhood to manhood, from the outermost edges of his world into its mysterious heart. And along the way he discovers there’s more at stake than his simple curiosity: life in his enigmatic universe is about to become impossible…

Five hundred years after a handful of human starship travelers got lost in a hostile universe, their descendants are still struggling for survival. As hard as life is on The Raft — a platform remnant of the ship’s hull — it’s even harder in The Belt — a string of shacks circling the iron-rich core of a dead star. Every Belter has heard the story of the legendary starship but most of them don’t believe it. But Rees, a lowly mine-rat, does. He wonders why the sky is angry red instead of the blue his parents remembered. Why food from The Raft gets less and less nutritious. Why fewer and fewer stars form every day. In his quest to find answers, Rees travels from boyhood to manhood, from the outermost edges of his world into its mysterious heart. And along the way he discovers there’s more at stake than his simple curiosity: life in his enigmatic universe is about to become impossible…

Five hundred years after a handful of human starship travelers got lost in a hostile universe, their descendants are still struggling for survival. As hard as life is on The Raft — a platform remnant of the ship's hull — it's even harder in The Belt — a string of shacks circling the iron-rich core of a dead star. Every Belter has heard the story of the legendary starship but most of them don't believe it. But Rees, a lowly mine-rat, does. He wonders why the sky is angry red instead of the blue his parents remembered. Why food from The Raft gets less and less nutritious. Why fewer and fewer stars form every day. In his quest to find answers, Rees travels from boyhood to manhood, from the outermost edges of his world into its mysterious heart. And along the way he discovers there's more at stake than his simple curiosity: life in his enigmatic universe is about to become impossible…

RESPLENDENT is a collection of stories that encompasses mankind's epic fight for survival against the Xeelee, a narrative of how man will change and evolve over our epic journey out into the universe. These tales will encompass the rise of sub-molecular empires in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang to mankind's final transformation. Full of cutting-edge science, descriptions of time and space on a mind-boggling scale and memorable, all-too-human characters. It is both the capstone to one of the most significant series in the history of SF and a remarkable achievement in its own right. This is a mature and uniquely talented writer at the height of his powers.

Michael Poole’s wormholes constructed in the orbit of Jupiter had opened the galaxy to humankind. Then Poole tried looping a wormhole back on itself, tying a knot in space and ripping a hole in time. It worked. Too well.Poole was never seen again. Then from far in the future, from a time so distant that the stars themselves were dying embers, came an urgent SOS — and a promise. The universe was doomed, but humankind was not. Poole had stumbled upon an immense artifact, light-years across, fabricated from the very string of the cosmos. The universe had a door. And it was open…

Isolated from the passage of time, a small colony of mammoths survives into the 20th century until their discovery by a group of shipwrecked sailors threatens their existence. Baxter combines well-researched details on the physical habits of prehistoric mammoths with an anthropomorphic touch to delineate the personalities of his protagonists. Fans of the prehistoric novels of Jean Auel and the animal-based fantasies of Richard Adams should enjoy this tale of triumph over adversity.

‘If they existed, they would be here’ ENRICO FERMI. In the second volume in Stephen Baxter's epic Manifold Series Reid Malenfant inhabits the universe Malenfant kick-started in TIME (‘science fiction at its best’ FHM) — and ‘they’ are here. When Nemoto, a Japanese researcher on the Moon, discovers evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence in the solar system, the Fermi Paradox provokes both Malenfant and Nemoto to question why now? Because, suddenly, there are signs of intelligent life in deep space in all directions. Deeper layers of Fermi’s paradox unravel as robot-like aliens, the Gaijin, seem to be e-mailing themselves from star to star, and wherever telescopes point, far away, other alien races are destroying worlds!

Powieść napisana została z pozycji pojmowania kosmosu przez człowieka końca dwudziestego wieku i zdobyczy współczesnej nauki; jest nowoczesną reinterpretacją wizji Wellsa. Podróżnik w czasie u Baxtera zmierza ku nieskończoności. Jego zadanie jest daleko ważniejsze niz tylko uratowanie Weeny: prócz tajemnicy przyszłości musi także rozwiązać paradoksy otaczającego go świata.Autoryzowana kontynuacja Wehikułu czasu Herberta George’a Wellsa.

Returned to the Earth of 2037 by the Firstborn, mysterious beings of almost limitless technological prowess, Bisesa Dutt is haunted by the memories of her five years spent on the strange alternate Earth called Mir, a jigsaw-puzzle world made up of lands and people cut out of different eras of Earth’s history. Why did the Firstborn create Mir? Why was Bisesa taken there and then brought back on the day after her original disappearance? Bisesa’s questions receive a chilling answer when scientists discover an anomaly in the sun’s core-an anomaly that has no natural cause is evidence of alien intervention over two thousand years before. Now plans set in motion millennia ago by inscrutable watchers light-years away are coming to fruition in a sunstorm designed to scour the Earth of all life in a bombardment of deadly radiation. Thus commences a furious race against a ticking solar time bomb. But even now, as apocalypse looms, cooperation is not easy for the peoples and nations of the Earth. Religious and political differences threaten to undermine every effort. And all the while, the Firstborn are watching …

Szef wielkiej stacji telewizyjnej dokonuje epokowego odkrycia — znajduje metodę tworzenia mikrotuneli podprzestrzennych, które pozwalają zajrzeć kamerze w każde miejsce w teraźniejszości i przeszłości... W przezroczystym świcie nic nie ukryje się przed kamerą. Ludzie zaczynają szukać sposobów na ukrycie swojej prywatności i swoich zbrodni…

Hugo Best Short Story nominee (2002).