Raft (S.F. Masterworks)

This is one on Baxter's early books and I really liked this story. Baxter has been criticized for using too much technology and therefore hard to understand. Hard Science Fiction is about technology, that is why I like it. It should not be mistaken for Fantasy.This book is not hard to understand, yet puts you out there in the future where you struggle to survive. Baxter has written some of the best Sci Fi stories I have ever read, mostly hard sci fi. I did not care for the books that he and Arthur C. Clark co-wrote. Anyway, this book has some wonderful, wild ideas. I hope Stephen Baxter keeps at it for a long time to come.

This novel started out slow but became better and better. At times I think Baxter is channeling Arthur C Clarke which is a great compliment to him. Read this and go on to Xeellee. Baxter is awesome and my new favorite author. I discovered him by reading The Time Ships, (a sequel to Well's incredible Time Machine). Time Ships is one of the best books if have ever read! Raft is wonderful and I am going to continue with the series....and on..........

the characters aren't really the story but their predicament is. This book is out of print and I spent a small fortune getting this old library copy from Australia as a xmas gift for my son. His original, worn copy was a paperback from a campground when he was about 10- years old. He was very happy to have this!

Not being a great writer myself I will let others do the plot summaries and simply state my opinion of the book.I consider Baxter one of the core group of hard science fiction writers however reading his books often feels too much like work...unlike Banks or Reynolds. Maybe its too much exposition on physics and too little character development. The balance between the two is off.All in all, a so so book.

If you are a Xeelee Sequence fan you will be happy with this book. Not the best in the series but has all the Baxter traits - relatable characters, hard sci-fi, satisfying ending.

This book is a very cool sci-fi book

GREETINGS,GREAT BOOK,GREAT SERVICETHANK YOUBILL MILLER ,LAS VEGAS

Some interesting ideas, but lots of flaws. As many others have said, the characters read as if they're from a young adult novel (a bad one), with very little depth. They're basically all 1 dimensional sci-fi tropes, including the main character, who's the genius stuck working in the mines until he scraps his way up to become the leader who saves humanity while always remaining humble and pure. Others have also point out flaws in the physics of the books, which I agree with as well. But the biggest flaw to me was the preposterous central premise of humans surviving for five centuries on tiny scraps of wreckage from their orginal ship. In one case, an entire subculture has built a mini world around a metal cube measuring just a few meters on each side. Apparently they've expanded the little wordlet with the dead bodies of generations of ancestors, living off the scraps for a few hundred years. Ummm, what? And of course (WARNING - SPOILERS) the final escape to a new nebula with just a few dozen people in a single cramped pod made no sense. They would all quickly have died yet again, having vastly fewer resources than even the original shipwrecked crew. Just because Baxter talks a lot about gravity and orbital velocity does not make this legitimate hard sci-fi.

This is a pretty imaginative piece of SF.The story involves the descendants of a star ship which passed into a different universe where gravity is a million times stronger. Hence stars a smaller and shorter lived and even small objects have considerable gravity. These descendant live in a nebula, inhabiting the Raft, a structure which includes the body of the ship, and the Belt, a series of dwellings orbiting the core of a small dead star mining the iron. There is considerable friction between the two colonies and the divisions in society result in revolution within these colonies and war between them. There are also stories of other worlds and fabulous creatures living among the nebula gases. However the colonies face a bigger challenge to find a new home and must unite to escape from the dying nebula.The story is relatively short (245 pages), but is creative and thought provoking, with plenty of physics about the effects of high gravity environments. A good read for SF fans.

A rather obvious first novel or rather expansion of a short story.Thankfully the author has produced better since then (although his collaboration with Terry Pratchett) was pretty awful.I was struck by similarly to some of Arthur C Clarke’s earlier works and it does not bear well on the comparison.

Sci-fi covers a wide spectrum of themes and ideas. This book is a book of extremes, on that spectrum, that isn't the best combination for me (might be for you). It was extremely unbelievable, extremely hard/pseudo scientific (hard to tell which, since the setting was so extreme), with extremely one-dimensional characters. I would never recommend this book to anyone, however, it's okay for someone's first novel, which I gather this was for Baxter. It was readable and if you're just looking for a complete timekiller, you could do worse.

A really enjoyable readLooking forward to the next instalment. Was a refreshing change to read a sci-fi book that wasn't full of advanced technology

Sorry I didn't like it

Great book love Baxter.Read a few of these xeelee books altough cant really say I know much about the xeelee.He mentions them then flits away bit frustrating,books interesting concept though,baxter has some good ideas in his books.Does amaze me how these guys churn out so many books they are all geniuses.

Like watching journey to the centre of the earth with Peter Cushing in book form. Needed a harder edge for me. Read it all though. Not a bad read.

excellent reading.

Took me a while to get into it but after i got over the whole flying tree thing and bought into the story i was hooked.

An unusual story, which unless you can get your head around the environment this story is based in, it is difficult to read, otherwise its fun !

A holiday read.

It was confusing at the start in a wonderful way and amazingly imaginative! Read it as You won't be disappointed.

Stunning ....what an imagination...Trees !!!! where does this stuff come from?? if you love SCI FI then you have to read Stephen Baxter.

Didn't enjoy this story

An sich ein nettes Gedankenspiel, wie das alles so wäre, wenn die Schwerkraft extrem ist. Daraus entwickelt der Autor ganz neue Formen menschlicher Habitate, auf denen sich dann die Handlung abspielt. Leider bleiben aber die Figuren blass und klischeehaftet, einen wirklich interessanten, widersprüchlichen Charakter sucht man vergebens. Dass die Physik an einer zentralen Stelle einen groben Schnitzer enthalt (Swingby am Zentralgestirn funktioniert nicht), mehr als ich der literarischen Freiheit zugestehen will, trübt meine Lesefreude auch noch ein wenig. Es bleibt ein netter SciFi-Roman, flüssig zu lesen, mit nicht allzuviel Tiefgang.