Subject: Review: Stephen Baxter's _Flux_

From: [email-masked] (Paul S Jenkins)
Date: 07 Jul 1998 11:03:47 -0400

_Flux_ by Stephen Baxter
	Review Copyright 1998 Paul S. Jenkins

You know something's not normal as soon as you start the first chapter of
this strange novel. The people in it are human -- it says so, right there
on the page -- but you soon realize they're not the same kind of humans
you meet on late twentieth century Earth.

They seem to have the same feelings, desires, hopes and fears -- the same
_character_ -- as present-day people, but they inhabit a world physically
far different from our own.

Baxter's achievement in _Flux_ is to have created a believable world out
of a single extrapolated idea so bizarre that a lesser or, in SF terms
'softer,' novelist would have balked at: his characters inhabit the mantle
of a star. They are genetically re-engineered, microscopic humans,
designed to suit their almost unimaginable environment. It is to Baxter's
credit that we do imagine it, even though the novel does, at times, have
the feel of a medieval fantasy. Baxter's aliens, the Xeelee, also feature
in the background of this story.

The physics and biology appear to be well worked out from the initial
science-fictional extrapolation, and readers who like their SF hard will
have fun analyzing Baxter's world-building. His own essay on this -- with
particular reference to _Flux_ -- is available at
http://www.sfwa.org/bulletin/articles/baxter.htm (warning: the essay
contains mild spoilers).

The story is mainly that of Dura, a young woman who scrapes a living in
the 'upflux' -- a kind of scavenging area away from civilization, crossed
by lines of concentrated magnetism. One of the periodic 'glitches' in the
'magfield' leaves her homeless, and she and the few other survivors of the
cataclysm have to find a way to live. A group of them decide to head for
Parz City -- a place they've heard about but never visited.

Dura and her younger brother have adventures on the way, as well as at the
city itself -- an enormous wooden structure suspended at the pole of the
star. We also see something of the life of the city-dwellers, and learn of
the city's ultimate purpose.

Baxter's writing style is robust but smooth, not unlike a less-honed
version of Arthur C. Clarke, and is thus eminently readable. Although
_Flux_ is a story of characters in a unique but consistently imagined
world, the events that occur are derived directly from that strange
world's peculiarities. This is hard SF of a rare kind.

%A   Baxter, Stephen
%T   Flux
%I   HarperCollins
%C   London
%D   1994
%G   ISBN 0 00 647620 1
%P   366 pp.
%O   paperback, GBP 4.99

Paul S. Jenkins                    Portsmouth  UK