I finished Raft by Stephen Baxter last night. I bought Xeelee: An Omnibus last week because I want to give the series a proper go. Raft was the first book in the collection, only 162 pages long (though written in tiny text).

The writing felt a little cold at times. The characters weren’t very deep, and a few of them even merged in my mind as I read—everyone felt a bit two-dimensional. The setting was also surprisingly difficult to visualise. It’s a super weird universe: the Belt as a ring of cabins tied together by ropes, orbiting a burnt-out star (basically a sphere of iron being mined) floating in a nebula, itself orbiting a core. Then there’s the Raft, which I pictured as a giant bowl-shaped structure in a higher orbit. But even with those mental images, I often struggled to picture the scenes he described.

A lot of events just… happened, without much build-up or emotional fallout. At one point the protagonist straight up murders another young boy, and there are no real repercussions. It was jarring.

I’d heard that character work isn’t Baxter’s thing—the ideas are. And the ideas were cool, all centred around gravity and this strange fusion of physics and chemistry. It’s definitely not your typical fun, adventure-style sci-fi. The whole experience was just a bit weird, tonally and conceptually.

While I’ve painted this in a slightly negative light, I did actually enjoy it. I just think I would’ve struggled with another hundred pages of the same. It’s a neat story with some wild ideas, even if it never quite called to me throughout the day.

3.5/5