So I overall liked the book but the author’s attitude toward space exploration feels very dated. It was written in 1999.
But jeez, the main protagonist, Reid Malenfant, is such an Elon Musk stand-in it’s laughable. Usual brilliant billionaire tropes abound with typical attitude towards government bureaucracy, specifically NASA. So apparently the only reason we haven’t started mining asteroids and colonizing the moon yet is because… red tape??? This brilliant misunderstood billionaire comes along, slaps a few moth-balled rockets together and voil la, space program! Easy, right?
Maybe it would have side-tracked the pacing too much but honestly there’s no test flights, no program development, and practically no scientists. He seems to use the same guy, a marine biologist, to solve every technical problem from genetically engineering super-squid to detecting neutrinos. Don’t think they have a phD for both… And just as Musk would think the fate of the whole universe depends on his brilliant project to reach an asteroid. It really IS all about him!
This probably doesn’t do the book full justice. I DID kind of like it. A ton of it just didn’t age well given how our current private space flight dystopia has developed.
by divemastermatt
4 Comments
Elon Musk built a space agency that is larger than, and doing more impressive work than, NASA.
That road began with him flying to Russia to attempt to buy moth balled rocket engines.
The second test flight of the integrated rocket that will take humans to Mars was delayed for months by red tape for things ranging from testing seals for their horniness to infighting between government agencies over their different rocket hitting sharks statistical algorithms.
I haven’t read the book you’re talking about. And it came out before any of this happened. But it seems like a quite plausible story line.
It’s been a long time since I read this trilogy, but I remember liking it well enough. Not like great or anything, but enjoyable.
FYI, there are different versions of Malenfant in every Manifold novel, so it’s kinda hard to talk about characterization. My take on the Malenfant character, as portrayed in Time, was that he was meant to be a pastiche of Howard Hughes-esque people, which I would say fits Musk quite well. The dudes name is French for “bad child”; I interpreted him here to be just as much a satire of that kind of “brilliant billionaire CEO” idea as anything else.
My memory of it is also that it was very much an “ideas” novel; the author appeared to be much more interested in writing about uplifting squid to be space pilots than they were in depicting an actual realistic space program.
Malenfant is a protagonist in the rich/arrogant/he-man technocrat tradition of Cussler and Heinlein ( and the more hateful Musk), but I got chuckles over his “bad-baby” surname.
Manifold Space is just beyondo Magnificent.
Manifold Origins is beyondo beyondo.
Does the character get most of his $$$$ from the government, also like Elon?