Read Online Last And First Contacts (Imaginings #2) Compiled By Stephen Baxter Text

great collection of some terrifying but incredibly thoughtprovoking short stories all within a delightful box of classic Science fiction,

Exploring all aspects of humanity, what it is to be human and what it is to exist, have existed and possibly exist in the future, I love science fiction because I love the journey of imagination into the human species' possible futures, And, for reasons I'm not totally sure of, Stephen Baxter is one of my favourite scifi writers, . . correct that he is the only scifi author I read these days,

Surely all of us are fascinated by the future and by the big scientific and political questions and challenges that humankind will face as we trace the contours of our past and present and try to imagine them into our future.
The biggest question of all, I guess, is whether we will ever have the technological capability to find and explore other habitable worlds and their inhabitants, And, by the time we do, what will our world look like

politically and economically Will, as Baxter suggests in one of the short stories in this collection, space exploration be led and conducted by the private sector Will there still be a private sector

Perhaps I enjoy Baxter's writing so much for three reasons.


Firstly, as Ian Whates points out in his introduction to this collection of Baxter's short stories, Baxter knows his scientific stuff, so his imaginings of the future are based on seemingly profound knowledge of presentday science and where it may be leading us so much so, in fact, that I often struggle to understand some of the science.


Secondly, Baxter seems to have a deep sense and knowledge of history, His one story in this anthology, based on Nazi research during the Second World War on rockets, speculates on the arrival of an alien spaceship near their research site and the Nazi's plans to use the alien technology to start an intergalactic war.
Nice detail scientific, political and personal in the story,

Thirdly, Baxter has a fine sense of the interplay between the big things very big things in some cases and the mundanely human and personal, The last story in the anthology tells the tale of a mother in rural England and her astrophysicist daughter waiting out the Big Rip when dark energy a real scientific concept permeates the universe, gains precedence over gravity and eventually rips everything apart down to molecular level.
Not the end of the world, but the end of everything, of all matter, The daughter is the scientist who has predicted the exact date and time of the Big Rip, Her mother, knowing that all is to end, continues to nurse and plan her little domestic garden,

Some of the stories in this collection are not so good a little bland, mundane and perhaps hastily put together, But there are mainly gems,

The only problem I have with Stephen Baxter is that he has not written enough works to satiate my appetite for good, thoughtful, realistic and imaginative science fiction.
Imaginings is a project from NewCon Press in the UK producing a limited number of signed hardback editions with unlimited numbers of ebooks, The ISBN is for the hardback, but this is an ebook edition,

Last and First Contacts is a collection of eleven short stories written by Stephen Baxter and selected by him for this edition, A collection of mostly recent short stories by Baxter, A good number of the stories cover Baxter's familiar territory of vast sweeps of time and the fate of humanity as a minor part of a large universe.
My favorites in here were "The Children of Time" human survival over the next billion years, "The Pacific Mystery" alternate history with a rift in the middle of the Pacific that prevents circumnavigation of the globe, "Last Contact" cosmic inflation leads to the end of the universe", and "In the Abyss of Time" time travel to the end of time.
Some of the other stories are fairly minor, but the whole collection is worth reading, The curse of the short story collection: the ones I like, I wish would be longer, The ones I don't like, seem to drag on and get nowhere, Low character development high imaginative stories of humanity over eons, Awesome. Just what I want.

I read it because "Last Contact" was one of my favorites in a bestof anthology, It was the best in this collection, "Pacific Mystery" and "Children of Time" were also great,

The title Last and First Contacts is a play on Olaf Stapledon's sitelinkLast and First Men, and Stapledon's influence is evident in several of the stories in this collection.
I enjoyed the sweeping cosmological scale against which pieces like "In the Abyss of Time" are set, but also the more intimate atmosphere of some of the other stories.


I hadn't read anything by Baxter before, but his style here struck me as something of a throwback to an earlier, classical form of "situational" scifi, where the emphasis lies more on the exploration of a core concept than on the resolution of the action.
. . very much along the lines of Arthur C, Clarke's Odyssey or Rama books, That's not necessarily a bad thing in itself I quite enjoy that style, In this collection, however, several of the stories ended with me thinking, "Yes, and, . . " There seemed to be a final beat missing, This was more of a problem in the first half of the book, notably in "Erstkontakt" and "Halo Ghosts",

Several elements and concepts surfaced repeatedly across different stories: inhuman consciousness and intelligence, indistinctly seen aliens, journeying, Nazis, stromatolites, and religion specifically, Catholicism, I was pleased to see the latter treated gently, given how religious belief is so frequently ridiculed in modern science fiction,

All in all, this collection was a bit of a mixed bag, My favorites were "Last Contact" and "The Pacific Mystery", while "No More Stories" hit the other end of the spectrum, I would prefer to give this/but, rounding down, that leaves us with a three, I read a couple of Baxter novels a year or two ago, but this is the first time Ive read any of his short stories, As with any collection, I found some very good stories and a couple of stories that didnt resonate to the same degree, Every reader will have his or her own favorites,

Baxters stories involve grand cosmological concepts unfolding over vast sweeps of time or space, and several alternate histories, including one of my favorites, The Pacific Mystery.
Like many of the stories in this collection it does not have a happy ending, The unifying motif in this collection is first and last contacts, and sometimes the first contact is also the last contact Dreamers Lake,

The stories in this collection dramatize scientific cosmological concepts and moral issues in science, but characterization is what brings stories to life, and my favorite stories are those with more fully realized characterizations.
It is this ability which puts Baxter in the upper echelon of hard science fiction writers,
Love Baxter's short stories, Such a buffet but always a thread tying them together, Stephen Baxter on oivallinen kirjailija, joka näemmä hallitsee myös novellit, Last and First Contacts on kokoelma novelleja, joissa jonkinlainen punainen lanka on kontaktien teema, Kokoelman aloittaa ensimmäinen yhteys tarina Erstkontakt, ja päättää viimeisistä kontakteista kertova Last Contact,

Toinen ulottuvuus on aika, kirjassa kohdataan muun muassa aikabatyskooppi ja seurataan ihmiskunnan tulevaisuutta baxtermaisen mittavin loikkauksin,

Novellit ovat mielenkiintoisia, Mieleen jää Last Contact, joka on todella herkkä ja koskettava maailmanlopun ja viimeisen kontaktin kuvaus, Toinen mieleenpainuva teos on vaihtoehtohistoriallinen The Pacific Mystery, joka vie lukijan natsien mahtavalle ilmalaivalle selvittämään, miksi Tyynenmeren yli ei voi päästä, Syy on ovela.

Hieno kokoelma kokeneelta ja taitavalta kirjoittajalta,.