{"id":18749,"date":"2022-03-17T20:13:29","date_gmt":"2022-03-18T00:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/?p=18749"},"modified":"2022-03-17T20:13:29","modified_gmt":"2022-03-18T00:13:29","slug":"world-engines-creator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/2022\/03\/world-engines-creator\/","title":{"rendered":"World Engines: Creator"},"content":{"rendered":"

{4.5\/5} “This… this super Earth in a lifeless Solar System, stuffed with samples of lost life from the real<\/strong> Earth. To show us what we missed? This is clearly a comparative exercise. But I doubt very much it is for our benefit.”<\/p>\n

World Engines: Creator<\/strong> by Stephen Baxter, published in 2020<\/p>\n

Reid Malenfant and his motley crew emerge into a reality where the planet Persephone exists where Mars usually is. They find people living there, so they decide to land. While descending he sees an arc of electric blue — and then they crash. Later he finds the same thing happened to the people who live there — and for them it’s the year 1992.<\/p>\n

This is the sequel to World Engines: Destroyer<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s about enslaving people who are not quite human because it’s thought to be necessary — and to protect the rest of the population from disease. It’s about building a rocket, and how different forms of life might evolve in different places.<\/p>\n

It’s particularly worth reading for Baxter’s speculation about how history could go different ways, and what beings of unimaginable power, the World Engineers, are up to in the Solar System.<\/p>\n

The promise of the duology is fulfilled — you won’t be able to put it down once you’re in the last section. It contains some startling ideas.<\/p>\n

I’ve read 16 books by Baxter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{4.5\/5} “This… this super Earth in a lifeless Solar System, stuffed with samples of lost life from the real Earth. To show us what we missed? This is clearly a comparative exercise. But I doubt very much it is for our benefit.” World Engines: Creator by Stephen Baxter, published in 2020 Reid Malenfant and his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7,28,5,8],"class_list":["post-18749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-book","tag-novels","tag-review","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18749"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18749\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18776,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18749\/revisions\/18776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidmswitzer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}