| Author: | Stephen Baxter |
| Copyright: | 1991 |
| Date Reviewed: | 5/1/92 |
| Rating: | 5.0 |
"Raft" began as a hard core science fiction about a universe in which gravity is one billion times stronger than ours. It was a good beginning and I looked forward to some good science but instead the novel took on a fantasy feeling with really bad science. In the story, Rees is a foundry worker who has lived on the Belt all his life. The Belt is a collection of run down apartments connected to form a ring. The ring orbits a core star remnant. Belt miners excavate iron from the core for sale.
When a tree, the nebular's form of trucking, arrives at the Belt, Rees stows away and is taken to the Raft where life is not so hard. Rees wants answers to life's questions, principally, why is the nebula dying? There he joins the astronomy service but all is soon lost when a revolution pulls down the current government. Rees is forced into exile. No longer welcomed on the Belt for his desertion, he is again exiled to Boney, a worldlet whose core is an old escape pod. This worldlet is constructed of the bones of the inhabitants ancestors. The inhabitants are cannibals.
Rees escapes from Boney in the belly of a whale and from the animal learns how to escape the nebula. Through telepathic control (very convenient) he maneuvers the whale back to the Raft where he convinces the population that the Raft (later just the Raft core) can sling shot around the black hole at the core of the nebula and travel to a distant "living nebula.
"Raft" was relatively easy to read but there were many things that bothered me about it. The author borrowed heavily from other work so little was truly original. The concept of a space ships' descendents revolting against the ruling class has been done many times before, notably by Heinlein in "Orphans of the Sky" and Aldiss in "Starship". The trees were borrowed from "Integral Tree" by Silverberg and "Hyperion" by Dan Simmons. The lottery system to decide who would leave the raft is straight out of "When Worlds Collide".
There is a good amount of bad science in the book. At one point a character throws a spear at the Belt core and it wraps around and comes straight back. I don't believe any hyperbolic curve could account for that. When the trees approach their destination, travelers can make out individual faces showing the author does not understand perspective. The Boneys live primarily off their ancestors flesh but this kind of ecology could never sustain itself.
Overall a very mediocre novel.