Hearthspace by Stephen Baxter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Well, honestly, I thought this would have been a more breathtaking take on colony shipping, especially with a plug like what we get in the blurb. Completely altering the way she thinks about everything, etc.

And to be fair, it IS there, in the text. Hearthspace itself is pretty fascinating. Multi-universal exploration of space, of space itself AND alt-universes--a very Baxterian trope we've seen with his Manifold series.

But in this particular book, I can't say whether it's an awfully our-world-reflective story, or whether it's almost cartoonishly set with its focus squarely on fascism. And, like I said, it's rather too on the nose.

You'd think an interstellar civilization could get things moving a bit better without mass-scale slavery. But it IS audacious enough to be plausible. Especially when the goal is just power and looting without thinking about sustainability or long term anything.

Ahem.

No, no, it's not relevant today.

But that brings me back to my rating. Why so low? Because it's practically all just fighting the man from inside the belly of the beast, with just a FEW small parts that fulfill the promise of the blurb.

It could have been so much more.



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