Reviews

Temps by Stephen Baxter, Bénédicte Lombardo

wole_talabi's review against another edition

4.0

I really enjoyed all of the interesting extrapolation of scientific concepts in this book, and there are a lot of them. Everything from the Fermi Paradox, Probabilistic doomsday, Orbital mechanics, Quantum theory, The Big Crunch, Big Bang, Big Chill, Wave descriptions of time, alternate universes and physical laws, Genetic engineering and more. So many fascinating ideas all woven into this story. Most of all, I enjoyed the big idea at the heart of the story. That humanity could improve upon the generation of universes from gravity anomalies by using remnants of the past universe as new anomalies in a new universe at the end of artificial vacuum decay.

In terms of characters and plot, it left something to be desired (and several plot points were never really resolved and so characterization is thin) but the breakneck speed and sheer fun and magnitude of all that happens kept me engaged even when there were long stretches of infodump.

_fu's review against another edition

4.0

Wild. Oddly satisfying. Cool theories.

loonbal's review against another edition

slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.5

I had a hard time getting past the bad math.  Emma Stoney is definitely the smartest person in the book. Among other things, she is the only one to consider that

a sequence of zeros and ones might refer to the binary representation of an integer

, which is frankly so dumb that I have a hard time spoilering it.

This is an example of Bayes’ rule, which is a technique for assigning probabilities to competing hypotheses with only limited information. In fact—” He hesitated, calculating. “—the probability that you’re right is now two-thirds, on the basis of your ball being third out.” Emma tried to figure that for herself. But, like most probability problems, the answer was counterintuitive.

It's counterintuitive because it's wrong.

At this point, I put down the book for a few weeks.  I hoped that this would be a minor point that we could move past.  As a motivation for why a few people are sparked to solve a non-problem and incidentally invent space travel, I could cope with it, but they didn't stop there.  They used this bad math to compound with terrible logic to calculate

the time until the extinction of humanity.

 

And then

the entire planet goes crazy with people giving up all hope and committing suicide in large numbers

because everybody believes this bad math and nobody is able to argue against it.  It is infuriatingly stupid.

thesammylife's review against another edition

4.0

SPACE SQUIDS!

muddyfiftysix's review against another edition

4.0

3.5 stars really. It started off really slow and a lot of it was meh to me. But there were great shining parts to it and I think I'll continue to read the series.

tom_my's review against another edition

challenging informative reflective slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

baddoctor's review against another edition

adventurous dark informative mysterious tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

lorune's review against another edition

3.0

There is only 1 way to describe this book....

Weird as hell.

The first part was a bit slow and not really fast moving, and before you know it your in all sorts of madness.

Did i mention it was weird ?

spitzig's review against another edition

1.0

Crap. It was like an old school 1950's SF novel, and not in a good way. The book was mostly populated by engineers explaining things to each other. Also, it ranted about the bureaucracy of NASA(and the US govt.) as much as any Heinlein novel. The characters were not interesting. The plot was crap. Too much of the "plot" was really just talking about science, so not enough HAPPENED in the book.

touchinggrass's review against another edition

dark emotional medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25