In the first three pages of Manifold: Time, Stephen Baxter takes us from the colonization of the solar system to the heat death of the universe. It's an appropriate opening salvo for an epic hard science fiction trilogy.

Manifold: Time is ostensibly the story of Reid Malenfant, a one-time astronaut candidate who washed out and made his fortune in business instead. He's still a vocal space advocate, and as the novel opens he unveils a daring plan to mine near-Earth asteroids using old shuttle technology.

The plot is complicated by Cornelius Taine, a brilliant scientist and founder of Eschatology, Inc. After researching a probability-based doomsday theory known as the "Carter prediction," Taine is convinced that humanity will destroy itself within 200 years.

With Malenfant's help, he finds a likely candidate for such guidance -- a signal hidden in the flow of neutrinos that suggests they redirect Malenfant's mining mission to an unusual asteroid named Cruithne.

Cruithne is just the beginning of a journey that will lead to the birth of a new species and take Malenfant through a dizzying array of times and universes.

One of Manifold: Time's pleasures is how much of it is based on current science.

The strangely-orbiting Cruithne really exists, and so do the Carter prediction, much of the novel's cosmology and the theories on squid intelligence that form an important subplot.

"In engineering, experience gained is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined."
     

It's an amazing adventure, written on a scale that would make Olaf Stapledon's jaw drop. But Baxter goes much farther than pure adventure -- the book's true exploration is philosophical.

Baxter takes space exploration to its logical extreme, and then dares to ask, "What's the point? If we conquer the galaxy, or even the whole universe, what do we do next?

It's the old question -- "what's the meaning of life?" -- but Baxter uses the vast scope of his setting to make it concrete and practical. It's philosophy seen through the lens of engineering, where the results are more important than the pretty argument.

The philosophical nature of the novel means, however, that the characters are more viewpoints than individuals. They're almost allegorical, with names that reflect their abstract natures.

Malenfant is the "bad child," outraging everyone with his secret projects and hidden agendas. Emma Stoney, his ex-wife, is the only truly grounded character, struggling to make "stone-faced" practical sense of the high-flying discussions of astronomy, mathematics and biology.

In fact, when it comes right down to it, there's more Stephen Baxter in all of the characters than is usual in his books.

Several of the characters even remark that their adventures are like a story, and many of their thoughts clearly represent Baxter's own arguments with himself.

As a U.S. congresswoman writes in her journal about two-thirds of the way through the book, "we must come to terms with the prospect of our own destiny or demise."

That's exactly what Baxter is trying to do here, both as an individual and as a member of the human species.

He poses such difficult questions that one could almost forgive him if he copped out and didn't answer them. What's amazing is that he does present an answer, one that's shocking, but as hard-edged and practical as the question.

He also follows through on the consequences of that answer, ending the novel with a literally apocalyptic climax which leaves the reader with only one question: "What's next?"

That's where the true scale of Manifold: Time becomes apparent. This is only the first book in a trilogy, so Baxter's apocalypse is just the warm-up.

It's hard to imagine where he can possibly take the series in the second book -- much less the third -- but finding out is going to be fascinating.