Back in the late 1980s, there was a thriving small press genre magazine scene in the UK. There was only one professional genre fiction magazine which published science fiction, Interzone, whose circulation was nonetheless so small by US standards the Hugo Awards spent decades trying to define and re-define its magazine award category, at one point even inventing the nonsensical “semi-professional magazine”. Other UK genre fiction magazines focusing on sf, and fantasy, did pop up from time to time. They lasted a handful of issues and then folded. But the small press magazines were much longer-lived.
One of the more successful small sf zines was Dream Magazine, published between 1985 and 1992, initially bi-monthly but quarterly from 1988. It was published in A5 format, stapled, around 64 pages, printed black throughout, and with coloured card covers. Its contents were traditional science fiction — very much 1980s science fiction, but of a style that harkened back to the late 1950s and early 1960s.
It was in Dream Magazine I first encountered Stephen Baxter’s fiction, although his story was published under the name SM Baxter. (He had a story published in Interzone, also as SM Baxter, the previous year, but I don’t remember seeing it.) Baxter was one of a number of British sf writers who were published in Dream in the early part of the career.
In fact, there was a group of young UK sf writers whose careers started in the late 1980s and who got their start in small press magazines and Interzone. Many of them attended science fiction conventions, especially the annual Eastercon, where we would hang out and joke about what was needed in a story to guarantee a sale to Interzone. It was another 25 years before I saw print in Interzone as an author, although I reviewed books for UK sf magazines, including Interzone, throughout the 1990s and 2000s.
There was another group, this time of small press magazine editors, who attended conventions, where we would share slush pile horror stories. I co-edited a magazine called The Lyre, which lasted from 1991 to 1993, but produced only two issues… yet still managed to publish fiction by Gwyneth Jones, Peter F Hamilton, Keith Brooke, Simon Clark, Eric Brown, Michael Cobley, and… Stephen Baxter.
When Stephen Baxter sold his first novel, Raft (1992, UK), he ensured I’d receive a review copy… and I did for his first four novels, but then my parents moved house, and it had been their address I’d been using. (These days, review copies are much easier to get, but those early Stephen Baxter first editions are worth quite a bit now.)
None of this has anything to do with Galaxias (2021, UK), which I calculate is Baxter’s 38th novel (in addition to eight collections). Unlike much of Baxter’s recent work, it is a standalone novel. One day in 2057, during a much-anticipated eclipse, the Sun vanishes. Gone. Completely disappears in the blink of an eye. Planetary orbits begin to deteriorate. The climate system is profoundly affected. Two space missions, one returning from Mars, suffer disasters.
No sooner have scientists discovered the Sun has been transported to the Oort Cloud, at light-speed, than it suddenly returns to its original position. But the effects of its 24-hour disappearance remain — Earth’s changed orbit, its failing climate, the political and economic problems brought on by 24 hours of complete darkness and chaos…
It was all triggered in 1973, when the Pioneer 10 space probe performed a slingshot manoeuvre about Jupiter and gained enough velocity to exit the Solar System. A distant intelligence decided this indicated Earth could prove a future threat, and so temporarily removed the Sun as a warning.
The rest of the novel covers the work of a small cast of characters, first in speculating about the nature of the intelligence, dubbed “Galaxias”, and then forming a response to its warning. The West decides to send a crewed mission to the star where they believe Galaxias resides. The Chinese, however, have a very different, and secret, plan…
I’ve been reading and enjoying Stephen Baxter’s novels for thirty years. Some of them, obviously, are better than others. He handles big ideas — about space, time, physics, cosmology — with a sureness that makes them easy to follow and understand. Despite his prolificity, he manages not to repeat himself. Some would say that’s all science fiction needs to do in order to be considered good science fiction.
That’s as maybe — but it doesn’t make it good fiction. Science fiction does not get a pass on the other aspects of fiction just because it’s predicated on “ideas”. Baxter’s prose is serviceable — he is a fan of “transparent prose” — and readable. His characters are not deep, but not especially shallow, although they occasionally drift into stereotype. In his novel series, his books often tend to turn a little juvenile towards the end. Either that, or the ending feels a little rushed.
Happily, Galaxias displays neither of these latter two faults, perhaps because it’s a standalone. True, its premise takes a little swallowing, and some of the speculation which leads to the identification of Galaxias feels a little wild and unsupported. But this is a Stephen Baxter novel, and after thirty years of writing novels he knows what he’s doing and he’s very good at it. It’s equally true those who pick up his novels know what to expect — and are rarely disappointed.
Consistency may be, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “the hobgoblin of little minds”, but there’s something to be admired in a consistency of output from a writer, especially a writer who handles big ideas unlikely to be appreciated, or understood, by little minds.
