Space

Manifold: Space is the second installment in Stephen Baxter's award-nominated Manifold trilogy. As in the first book, the story revolves around Reid Malenfant, space explorer extraordinaire. But this is a different Malenfant. And a different universe. A new alien lifeform has appeared from deep space, yet 21st-century earth seems unfazed, overburdened by the continuing struggle against degradation of the planet. Still, some humans look to the stars and dream. There is Nemoto, a Japanese scientist who fears the aliens, worrying that they are but the first wave of an interstellar migration. And there is Malenfant, whose fear is tempered by an insatiable curiosity.

It is this curiosity that drives Malenfant to the far edge of the solar system, where he finds an artifact left behind by another alien civilization: A gateway that functions as a kind of quantum transporter, allowing virtually instantaneous travel over the vast distances of interstellar space.

As Malenfant embarks on a grand tour of the universe, Nemoto's worst fears about Earth's fate and its extinction begin to come true. While Malenfant, having traveled millions of light years, finds himself once more faced with a choice both impossible and necessary -- a choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself.