Manifold: time

Reid Malenfant has a plan to go to the stars, and it's very Musk-like even before Musk was a thing. OK fine. Most of the first 12% of this book (which is where I pressed the eject button) is taken up by a sophist discussion of the chances of human survival. So here's the argument: either human population grows exponentially/polynomially, it levels off at a sustainable level, or it crashes. Following so far? The fact that you are alive means that the most likely outcome is the third. Here's the logic: In the first two scenarios, the vast majority of all humans will live in the future. So if you picked someone (you) randomly, you'd most likely be in the far future! Because you are here, the most likely outcome is that humans die off soon. In the story, within 240 years at the most.

First of all, this is not a plot. Or characters. Or poetic language. Or description. Or ... any of a hundred other things that would be interesting. This is someone smoking too much pot and explaining their pot-infused philosophy to you. If an author wants to set up a coming apocalypse there's so many better ways to do it than this "clever" thought experiment.

Second of all, this therefore means that if humanity does survive into the far future, they have sent a message back in time to us with instructions on how to survive. That whole sophistry just sets up Reid Malenfant's purpose to be to look for the message from the future. This whole first part of the book is just to set that up. That makes no sense and I had to read it all for that reason? Give me a break!

At this point I searched for reviews of the book to see if anyone said the later parts of the book are worth it. And the top review of Manifold: Time that Google referred me to is one from Kirkus. It's fairly spoilery, so if the above BS is actually intriguing to you, don't click the review. Anyway, I've no interest in reading the schmoz that's described there.

DNF at 12%.

This was a much harder/darker science fiction book than my normal fare. I tend to read a lot of Star Wars/Star Trek with random stuff mixed in.

Always wanting more, I read this one on a recommendation from a friend.

I'll say up front, this is a great book. It's well written, kept me riveted, and had me wanting to finish including late night sessions, and finally just sitting down and finishing it.

However the topic is pretty dark. What happens when civilization thinks the world is ending? How do they behave when children start evolving ahead of them? Lots of topics like that are explored, and for once the ending is not all wrapped up and pretty, it's actually quite dark.

There are two more in the series and I will probably read them, but I need to go find some popcorn book to clear my head because this one was one of those deep thinking/dystopic with a dash of hope tossed in depending on how you view the subject.

Lots of human darkness explored as well with the sci-fi story as the backdrop.