I have just finished my second book of the year (I write 'em real quick), Manifold:Space by the utterley wonderful Stephen Baxter. This is proper Sci-fi, none of that nasty Star Wars shite. Space, which is book 2 in the Manifold Sequence, has most of the same characters from Time, which is a little odd as I seem to recall the cosmos exploded at the end of that one, hey ho. At the end of Space I still have not worked out whether it is set hundreds of millions of years after Time, when humanity has once again evolved, or whether it the event at the end of book one changed the perception of time iteslf, or it might be in an alternate timeline. I thought that Manifold:Space got bogged down a little in the middle, there was a little too much emphasis on wheeling galaxies, eliptic orbits and gamma ray bursters, but once past that the plot fairly rockets along. The first jump forwards in time, a trifling matter of some hundreds of years, is as nothing when later in the book you are suddenly plunged five thousand years in to humanities future. Here is a good review of Manifold:Space by David Soyka. Although it claims in the review that Manifold is to be a trilogy (I have Manifold:Origin in my sweaty palms at the moment), I saw this on the bookshelves on my last book raid............ That would be a trilogy of four then, some details on Phase Space here, a review of Manifold:Origin, and a review of Manifol:Time here. That's all out of order isn't it, ok, it runs Time - Space - Origin - Phase Space.