《Stephen Baxter - Lakes of Light》.pdf

Lakes of Light STEPHEN BAXTER From Hartwell, David - Years Best SF 11 (2006) Stephen Baxter (tribute site: www.themanifold.co.uk) lives in Morpeth, England. He is now one of the big names in SF, with more than twenty SF novels published to date, and a large body of short fiction. I always thought of myself as writing hard SF, on a big scale maybe, but ideas driven, not romantic, so not space opera, he says. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia summarizes his early career thus: He began publishing SF with The Xeelee Flower for Interzone in 1987, which with most of his other short work fits into his Xeelee Sequence, an ambitious attempt at creating a Future History; novels included in the sequence are Raft (1989), Timelike Infinity (7992), Flux (1993), and Rind (1994). The sequence… follows humanity into interstellar space, where it encounters a complex of alien races; the long epic ends (being typical in this of UK SF) darkly, many aeons hence. Since the mid 1990s he has produced five or ten short stories a year in fantasy, SF, and horror venues, occasionally one in the Xeelee Sequence, and did in 2005 again. Lakes of Light was published in Constellations. It is a Xeelee story of alien supertechnology, somewhere between a Hal Clement and a Larry Niven setting. As the story progresses, new wonders are seen and new layers of insight are reached. This is the essence of hard SF The Navy ferry stood by. From the ships position, several stellar diameters away, the star was a black disc, like a hole cut out of the sky. The Navy ship receded. Pala was to descend to the star alone in a flitter—alone save for her Virtual tutor, Dano. The flitter, light and invisible as a bubble, swept inward, silent save for the subtle ticking of its instruments. The star had about the mass of Earths sun, and though it was dark, Pala imagined she could feel that immense mass tugging at her. Her heart hammered. This really was a star, but it was somehow cl