Paul Di Filippo Reviews Creation Node by Stephen Baxter

Creation Node, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz 978-1473228955, hardcover, 448pp, £25.00) September 2023

Stephen Baxter’s latest foray into mind-blowing cosmic speculation, a truly satisfying “done in one,” features an enchantingly real cast of characters exploring our solar system (and beyond), commencing in the year 2255, and extending for decades of future history afterwards. However, the book is almost two different beasts in one skin. Up to Chapter 33, it’s one type of story, more traditional and constrained, with only a few tantalizing hints of broader fields yet to explore. At that point, with only roughly a quarter of the book left, the narrative explodes into vaster dimensions. It’s not that the last fourth of the book undercuts the setup, which proves necessary, but that it’s so radically different from the realpolitik stuff, the “space, the final frontier” stuff, that the mental and physical disjunctions might wreak havoc with the reader. Let’s put it this way: the first three-quarters of Creation Node is 2001: A Space Odyssey up until the point where Dave Bowman enters the Monolith; the last quarter of the book is equivalent to that famous journey through spacetime ending up in the hotel room. In fact, I wonder if old slyboots Baxter did not have this exact template in mind.

But was he also channeling Charles Dickens’s most famous holiday tale?

Let’s save that question till later.

We start in the Oort Cloud, where a small ship, the Shadow, has encountered an anomalous astrophysical phenomenon. The Shadow is run by a group of humans called the Conservers, whose name, you might well guess, indicates their stance toward minimal interference in creation and a sustainable lifestyle. (Other polities with different attitudes rule Earth, the Moon and other habitable spaces.). What the Conservers have discovered is dubbed “Planet Nine,” a small black hole which proves to be the source of gravitic anomalies observed even in our era.

But Planet Nine is not a typical black hole, for it’s radiating information. The discovery of this goes to young Salma, our heroine, who has the unique background of being spaceborn and growing up entirely en route to the Oort. (Baxter does not fudge the huge distances of the solar system and the time which humanity’s relatively primitive propulsion systems must take to traverse these reaches.) Salma and the other crew members speculate that this constitutes mankind’s first ET contact, and while they cannot unriddle the language, they decide that simply retransmitting the data back to the black hole will be a good friendly response. They do so, and then the bizarreness begins.

Planet Nine “unfolds” into a habitable sphere, and a strange birdlike sapient—dubbed “Feathers”—appears. Feathers is, ahem, taken under Salma’s wing, and news of this unprecedented manifestation is sent back to the rest of civilization.

Now, slow-motion rivalries erupt. Earth and Luna send contesting missions. We meet important characters such as Conserver patriarch John Smith and Elizabeth Vasta, the Science Adviser to Earth’s President. Many years of travel later, they finally reach the Oort, where Feathers has provoked some new findings. Some dangerous head-butting occurs, but finally all parties unite to implement further investigations of Planet Nine. A small party of humans, including Salma and Feather, are landed there, another signal is sent—and poof, the explorers are wrenched out of our universe and literally into another. Here they meet a near-deity named Terminus and learn—

Well, I cannot possibly undertake to spoil this part, because this is the kernel of the book, and the pages where Baxter kicks out all the jams. He weaves a cosmological-metaphysical-existential tapestry that is unique and sure to shock. Suffice it to say that the revelations involve, in part, the old notion of a steady-state universe, a fact which should make the ghost of astronomer and SF author Fred Hoyle quite happy.

A short coda involving Vasta—who was one of the exploring party—extends the melancholy gravitas of the tale, as outlined in an earlier speech by Terminus:

The multiverse is a very large place, growing continually and eternally, and it is almost totally devoid of life and mind. Almost, but not entirely. Life forms like yours – embedded in the physics of a given reality – can emerge from that reality. Spontaneously. It is rare, but it happens.

And, we concluded, we who owed our own lives to still more unlikely accidents, there is nothing more precious than life and mind. It is to be found, cherished, protected – encouraged to grow.

Another thing that Baxter always accomplishes is to put humanity’s short-term problems and attitudes into a grander perspective. For instance, after finally emerging from climate change hell, Earth suddenly stands in the path of an enormous quasar jet of radiation from the center of our galaxy that threatens to fry all life. So much for the importance of all your worries about how much water and electricity it takes to make a yard of cotton fabric!

Baxter’s novel, from its Ben-Bova-like Solar System expeditions to its Clarkean far-outness, ultimately forms an organically coherent package that contains the gift of the sense that the universe is “not only weirder than we imagine, but weirder than we can imagine.” “We” not including Baxter.

Oh, and what about that Dickens analogy? As Terminus shows the humans a panorama of past, present and future, what else could I flash on than A Christmas Carol…? Like Scrooge, the humans must get enlightened, then decide how to live the rest of their lives under the weight of this new knowledge.

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