Subject: Review: "Raft" by Stephen Baxter

From: "Stevens R. Miller" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Apr 1996 20:00:30 GMT

"Raft" by Stephen Baxter
			Review by Stevens R. Miller
			This review is in the public domain.

Judge:		The clerk will read the indictment.

Clerk:		Defendant is charged with world-building.

Judge:		Stephen Baxter, you stand accused of Science Fiction's
		second highest crime. How do you plead?

Defendant:	[sotto voce, to Counsel] Uh, is this a capital offense?

Counsel:	Nah, not anymore. For death you have to be convicted of
		cluelessness about the Internet.

Defendant:	[to Judge] Your Honor, I would like to plead "guilty," but
		with an excuse. You see, I-

Judge:		The defendant's plea is accepted. As sentence, you are to be
		trivialized for seven hundred years, or until people stop
		arguing over whether or not Heinlein was a libertarian,
		whichever comes first.

On what has always seemed to me to be the strength of one book, "Mission of
Gravity", author Hal Clement is known widely as the Master of the art of
world-building. Loosely, this is the business of concocting a thought
experiment to determine what would happen if certain far-ranging assumptions
were made. For Clement, the assumption was that a monstrous planet would
spin so fast as to acquire the shape of an oblate spheroid, with centrifugal
force offsetting gravity's pull, the more so as one moved from pole to
equator (whew!). From that one idea, Clement gave birth to a novel, and to a
sub-genre.

Of course, Clement has had followers. Lots of them. So many that, in the
"been there, done that" style of SF fandom, contemporary world-builders have
to do more than build worlds; they have to climb over the worlds that others
have built before them. Those who overcome this obstacle earn places in our
hearts. Larry Niven (who we'll talk about more, shortly), standing squarely
on Clement's shoulders, built the Ringworld, which took the sub-genre to its
most literal conclusion. And everybody loved "Ringworld," so world-building
wasn't always a crime.

But, roughly around the time "Ringworld" embraced us, the notion of world-
building seemed to lose its inherent appeal. In the passing years, it has
become more of an obstacle than an objective. As with other of SF's staples,
the mere fact of devising a new physical system ceased to be enough to hold
our interest. Fandom, perhaps as it ages, yearns less to say, "gee whiz,"
and more to whisper, "ah so." Hence it is that we now compare our senses of
the poetry of Simmons, rather than the rocketry of Smith. Shoot, people are
even reading Silverberg in public now.

Years after "Ringworld," Niven tried again, with "The Integral Trees" -- and
*again* with "The Smoke Ring" -- set in a stable breathable gas torus in
orbit around a small star. Gravity in the torus was nil (Clement didn't
build them all, you know), so the characters could float off and be
lost. Some lived on huge trees that survived by colliding with airborne
flora, fauna, and water.  Humans, descended from a failed space mission,
populated the torus and gave Niven the cast he needed to make a world into a
story. It was a clever and thoughtful exercise. But, unlike "Ringworld,"
cynical fans wrote the book off.  "Niven's just world-building" summed up a
widespread view. It seemed as though the sub-genre was exhausted. But keep
the gas torus in mind.

Onto this tired stage strides, in 1991, Stephen Baxter, with "Raft."
Actually, he'd appeared there in 1989, when a portion of "Raft" appeared in
Interzone.  "Raft" has Larry Niven all over it. To begin, read the back
cover blurb:

	Imagine a universe whose force of gravity is one billion times
	stronger than today's. Human beings have detectable gravity
	fields. Stars are only a mile across and burn out within a year
	of their formation.

	Centuries before these events, a spaceship accidentally crossed
	into this universe and promptly collapsed upon itself. Somehow
	the crew survived. They emerged into a cloud of breathable
	atmosphere. Five centuries later their descendants are still
	struggling to survive...

Ignoring the bad grammar, this seems to have rather a lot in common with
Niven's ring of gas. Moreover, the cover art shows, floating free in the
"cloud of breathable atmosphere," enormous *trees*. The characters use them
as a means of transportation, living on either the raft made from the
remnants of the first ship, a ring of shacks in orbit around a dead star, or
a bizarre planetoid of dead bodies (yes, fleshy ones). Niven's characters
sometimes fought off "mobies," giant air-whales. Baxter's, calling them just
"whales," eat them.

But, before you think Niven is some kind of victim here, go back and read
what I said. Niven's name is *all over* this book. On the back, he's quoted
as saying, "He writes like I used to" -- and what a backhanded compliment
that is, eh?  At the head of the acknowledgments, Baxter begins by thanking
none other than Larry Niven for reading drafts. So, clearly, Niven approves
of what Baxter's done. That leaves only the reader to have his say.

"Raft" is about Rees, an awkward and unpopular teenaged boy with an above-
average intelligence and an aptitude for science (well, some mainstays of SF
will never die, I guess). He lives on the ring of shacks in orbit mere miles
above the rusty iron core of a dead star. The shack-dwellers mine the star
and trade its iron with the raft-dwellers, who have superior -- and
indispensable -- technology.  Everyone knows they live in "the Nebula." Rees
is one of the few shack-dwellers who suspects the nebula is dying. He stows
away on a flying tree, to the Raft.  There, he becomes a science student in
its caste-based social system. Tensions mount as the shack-dwellers and the
raft-dwellers factionalize internally, with civil war looming. The story
develops along familiar lines, but Rees has chances to experience most of
the Nebula's wonders and that's what's fun about the book.

And here's my review in a few words: the book is fun. It happens to be
world-building in its most undisguised form, but so what? It has a weird
connection to the built worlds of Larry Niven, but so what? The first
hundred pages might be impossible to comprehend if it weren't for that
dreadfully written blurb, but so what?  I say so because the physics of the
Nebula derive entirely from the "billion times stronger" force of gravity,
which isn't directly explained for a long time, but should have been right
up front.  The book is *fun*, and Baxter should be proud of having built an
interesting world.

Which brings us to the charges against him. One of Baxter's more recent
works is "Flux." This one has microscopic humans living on a neutron
star. Leonard Rysdyk reviewed it for the July, 1995, issue of "The New York
Review of Science Fiction."  He, like other reviewers, did not ignore what a
complex foundation Baxter had chosen for himself. But he, like other
reviewers, could only bring himself to offer qualified praise. "As a premise
and as an exercise in 'world-building'," Rysdyk wrote, "Flux is a mind-
blower." Note the restriction: "as an exercise in 'world-building.'"  Just
when and why did this form of literary exertion become a restricted class of
explosive?

Baxter himself seems reluctant to accept passage of Niven's (or Clement's)
crown.  In the Fall, 1995, issue of the SFFWA "Bulletin," he wrote
defensively about,
	"those of my stories which might be described as 'world-building,'
	 in the Hal Clement tradition."

Talking mostly about perceived similarity to James Blish's "Surface
Tension," Baxter tries hard to say he isn't following anyone's lead.
	"Parallels with 'Surface Tension' are, I guess, easy to draw."

Later:
	"I would argue that [my] works have converged on 'Surface
	Tension,' rather than derived from it in any direct way."

And after that:
	"a mark of success is a world-building story being reviewed
	 without reference to the nature of the physical scenario
	 itself."

In other words, being reviewed without being detected as a world-building
story. I don't know if I agree, but it's a sign of the times that Baxter
thinks so.

So you have a difficult decision to make, before you start to hunt for a
copy of "Raft." If you loved Clement's and Niven's worlds, and can stand to
be sent to Triveria if seen reading yet-another-world-building story, you
should commence hunting at dawn. If, on the other hand, exploring an unknown
universe just one more time seems too dreary, you can sleep late, though
I'll ask you why you even read science fiction, after you wake up.

I found "Raft" fascinating and compelling, both in and out of the context of
a world-building story.

Three stars out of four.

%A	Baxter, Stephen
%D	1991
%G	ISBN 0-451-45130-9
%I	Penguin Books
%T	Raft

Stevens R. Miller              http://www.interport.net/~lex/