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Welcome to the Fiction Excerpts and Interviews section of The Manifold. I plan to list all of Stephen's fiction excerpts and interviews available on the net on this page.
If you know of anything that could be included here, please e-mail The Manifold. All linked stories here are fully credited, nothing is copied or reproduced on The Manifold itself. The links are divided up into the following 4 categories:
Short Stories | Novel Excerpts | Interviews | Other
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- Omegatropic
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"Since daybreak the Rebels had been drawn into a stern line facing the English Army; Angus, with the rest of the MacDonald Clan, stood at the left end of the thin tartan line."
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- Sheena 5
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"Her life was short: lasting one summer, two at most, a handful of matings. But the songs of light and dance made every squid aware she was part of a continuum that stretched back to those ancient seas; and that her own brief, vibrant life was as insignificant, yet as vital, as a single silver scale on the hide of a fish."
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- The Children of Time
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"The people never would return. By the time the returning ice had shattered their monocultural, over-extended technological civilization, people had exhausted the Earth of its accessible deposits of iron ore and coal and oil and other resources. People would survive: smart, adaptable, they didn’t need cities for that. But with nothing but their most ancient technologies of stone and fire, they could never again conjure up the towers of Chicago."
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- Moon Six
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"He hid his lunar pressure suit in a ditch, and, dressed in his tube-covered cooling garment, snuck into someone's back yard. He stole a pair of jeans and a shirt he found hanging on the line there."
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- Raft
- The original short story that became the basis for the novel of the same name.
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"Now the boys were only metres away - and Glover giggled, his wide face flushed with excitement. Rees glared; but the skitters continued their dance, their dim intelligence unable to distinguish the boys' motion from the shadows cast by the falling stars."
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- These Things Happen
- An early unpublished story by Stephen Baxter (age 16!)
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"Lang was as near to excitement as he ever got. Shepard could see that. And yet there was something in the man's eyes, his manner, or something that told Shepard that Lang had another premonition coming on."
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- The Fubar Suit
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"In the year 2050, when I was eighteen years old, no American was flying into space. We'd ceded the high frontier: the Moon to the Japanese, Mars to the Russians, the asteroid belt to the Chinese. America, without space resources, got steadily poorer, not to mention more decadent. A hell of a time to grow up."
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- Prospero One
- Co-written with Simon Bradshaw
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"Morris’s controllers were working smoothly through their countdown procedures. There were 20 of them, all in ties and shirtsleeves. Their accents - cultured British, or crisp Australian from the de Havilland contractors who had built the launch facilities - permeated this stuffy box, here in the middle of the Australian desert."
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- The Gravity Mine
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"Here was the tight electromagnetic cage which had once tapped the spinning black hole like a dynamo. Here was the cloud of compact masses which had been hurled along complex orbits through the hole’s ergosphere, extracting gravitational energy. It was antique engineering, long abandoned."
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- On The Orion Line
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"Everybody knew what the chime meant: that we were approaching the fortress cordon. Either we would break off, or we would chase the Ghost cruiser inside its invisible fortress. And everybody knew that no Navy ship that had ever penetrated a fortress cordon, ten light-minutes from the central star, and come back out again."
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- First To The Moon!
- Co-written with Simon Bradshaw
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"But everything was going according to the book. Marsh didn't need instruments to tell him that: he could hear the singing of the rockets, all one hundred and sixty-eight of them clustered in that first Step, each an exquisite piece of engineering birthed in the factories of Derby and Southampton and each destined for just a few minutes' once-only use. The rocket cells were fired in their elaborate sequence by the electrical control he had laboured over so long - as many relays as a flying telephone exchange, as the Daily Mail had put it."
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- The Ghost Pit
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"I wasn't afraid, at that point. I looked up to that impossible bridge, a line drawn across the sky, aloof from our petty struggles. There are times when you just can't believe what you are seeing. A survival mechanism, I guess."
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"I have come to stay in Amalfi. I can't face going back to Britain -- not yet -- and to be here is a great relief after the swarming strangeness I encountered in Rome."
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"From his station, Pirius could see their black forms peeling off the walls of their Sugar Lump carriers. They spread graceful wings, so black they looked as if they had been cut out of the glowing background of the Core. Some of them were kilometers across. They were Xeelee nightfighters, but nobody in Strike Arm called them anything but flies."
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"Kilukpuk had been alive for a very long time. She had become so huge that her body had sunk into the ground, turning it into a Swamp within which she dwelled."
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"And Longtusk was angry, aggrieved, ignored. He worked the ground as he walked, tearing up grass, herbs and sedge with his trunk and pushing them into his mouth between the flat grinding surfaces of his teeth."
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"My name is Reid Malenfant.
You know me. And you know I'm an incorrigible space cadet.
You know I've campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In fact, in the past I've tried to get you to pay for such things. I've bored you with that often enough already, right?"
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"And now, more than three decades later, a few years into a whole new century, and here was Tracy with kids of her own, kids to whom Apollo was some sort of Cold War relic - not even that, something prehistoric and incomprehensible, something their grandfather had done. For somehow, as if mocking the old dreams, the space program had become a thing of the past, not the future."
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"Bisesa could barely take her eyes off the wall’s moving colors, its brightness. She had forgotten how drab and dun-colored Mir had been. But then, Mir had been another world altogether.
Aristotle said, “Good morning, Bisesa. This is your regular alarm call. Breakfast is waiting downstairs. The news headlines today are—”
“Shut up.” Her voice was a dusty desert croak.
“Of course.” The synthetic boy sang on softly."
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"For thirty million years the planet had cooled and dried, until, in the north, ice sheets gouged at the continents. The belt of forest that had once stretched across Africa and Eurasia, nearly continuous from the Atlantic coast to the Far East, had broken into dwindling pockets. The creatures who had once inhabited that timeless green had been forced to adapt, or move."
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- Interview with Stephen Baxter
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- James Palmer interviews Stephen Baxter
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- An interview with Stephen Baxter
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The co-author of Sunstorm, British science fiction author Stephen Baxter, talks about his latest collaboration with fellow writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke.
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- Tracing the Future - An interview with Stephen Baxter
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- Interview: Stephen Baxter
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- An interview with Stephen Baxter
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- Author tickled -- and nervous -- to collaborate with Arthur C. Clarke
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- An interview with Stephen Baxter
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In May 1999, Stephen Baxter was Guest of Honour at Seccon, a small convention held in Stevenage. During Seccon he was interviewed by sf reviewer and Clarke Award judge Tanya Brown.
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- Stephen Baxter answers your questions
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- Chat transcript from SciFi.com
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- A Painter of Immensities
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- A space mission... back to the Sixties
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The era of the space shuttle is coming to an end, and Nasa needs a replacement. Stephen Baxter considers some surprising options.
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- BBC 'Get Writing' course
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Stephen Baxter explains how to approach writing science fiction, and reveals his top 10 science fiction short stories.
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- Enjoying The Sun, While It Lasts
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Stephen Baxter considers the different ways the sun has caused the end of mankind in SF.
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- Fractal Futures: The Background to the 'Destiny's Children' Series
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As I write I’m putting the finishing touches to Resplendent, which is (in the noble tradition of Douglas Adams) the fourth book in my ‘Destiny’s Children’ trilogy.
This series, published in the UK by Gollancz and in the US by Del Rey, is about the possibilities of human evolution.
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- Icon of the Month - December 2004
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"There's more to the man's writing than a twists in the fabric of classic sci-fi for some cheap one-off recognition. Baxter uses his knowledge to expand on well-established themes and also to create a much bigger world. One that if you look at some of his other pieces is, a dark and lonely place for us humans."
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- Pilots of our future
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I was born in the Fifties, and the media icons of that grey-tinged decade, like Dan Dare and Quatermass, have been names in the background all my life. Now, thanks to some helpful reissues and repackaging, we have access to these monuments of a vanished age.
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- Simply the Greatest
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Stephen considers the alternate history of Alexander the Great, one of the historical figures in Time's Eye.
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- Stars in our eyes
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Has the march of science made science fiction obsolete? Stephen Baxter argues that we need it more than ever.
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- Stephen Baxter interviews Charlie Duke
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In July 1999, 30 years after the first Moon landing, Stephen had the opportunity to meet one of the original participants of Apollo when he interviewed Charlie Duke, Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 16.
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- Stephen Baxter's Space Arks
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We seem fascinated with stories of humanity's destruction and possible rebirth. Some express that fascination by moving to Montana with copious amounts of canned goods, but others go into space with author Stephen Baxter.
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- The Moon Is Hell
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'The Moon is Hell' was first published in Astronomy Now, September 1998, and is reproduced on The Baxterium.
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- The Science of Old Earth
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My “Old Earth” stories are the product of many impulses. But the very first was a trip to Australia for the Worldcon of 1999. After the con, my wife and I toured the island continent. Many overseas attendees took the same opportunity, and we encountered such exotic fauna as the Bushy-bearded Editor of Analog (Stanleius Schmidtus).
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- The Spacetime Pit: Diary of a Collaboration
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The Spacetime Pit was my second collaborative story with Eric Brown.
The story’s genesis goes back to June 1995. Eric stayed with me and my wife over the weekend of the launch, in London, of my novel The Time Ships.
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