''Raft'' is a 1991

hard science fiction Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell's '' Islands of Space'' in the Novem ...

book by British writer Stephen Baxter. ''Raft'' is both Baxter's

debut novel A debut novel is the first novel a novelist publishes. Debut novels are often the author's first opportunity to make an impact on the publishing industry, and thus the success or failure of a debut novel can affect the ability of the author to p ...

and the first book in the

Xeelee Sequence The Xeelee Sequence (; ) is a series of hard science fiction space opera novels, novellas, and short stories written by British science fiction author Stephen Baxter. The series spans billions of years of fictional history, centering on humanity ...

, although the Xeelee are not present. ''Raft'' was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1992.

Setting

The novel is an elaborated version of his 1989 short story of the same title. The story follows a group of humans who have accidentally entered an alternate universe where the

gravitational force In physics, gravity () is a fundamental interaction which causes mutual attraction between all things with mass or energy. Gravity is, by far, the weakest of the four fundamental interactions, approximately 1038 times weaker than the strong ...

is far stronger than our own, a "billion" times as strong. Planets do not exist, as they would immediately collapse under their own gravity; stars are only a mile across and have extremely brief life-spans, becoming cooled kernels a hundred yards wide with a surface gravity of five '' g''. Human bodies possess a "respectable" gravity field in and of themselves. "Gravitic chemistry" also exists, where gravity is the dominant force on an atomic scale.

Plot summary

The few thousand humans survive in a

nebula A nebula ('cloud' or 'fog' in Latin; pl. nebulae, nebulæ or nebulas) is a distinct luminescent part of interstellar medium, which can consist of ionized, neutral or molecular hydrogen and also cosmic dust. Nebulae are often star-forming regio ...

of relatively breathable air, existing in divided communities. The society is highly stratified, with the elite living on the "Raft" (the remains of the starship that contains almost all the high technology), workers/miners living on various "Belt" worlds (where they mine burned-out star kernels), and the "Boneys", a nomadic band of "unmentionables" who live on worlds created out of corpses. It is not directly detailed how humans came to the universe, but hints within the story indicate that the Raft ship came through a rift in our universe into this alternate reality. The original short story, also by Stephen Baxter, provides more insight as to how humans arrived, "five hundred years ago a great warship – chasing some forgotten opponent – blundered through a portal. A gateway. It left its own universe and arrived here." A glimpse of the high-gravity universe is seen in the book ''Ring'', implying that the humans in Raft came from the main universe of the Xeelee Sequence, although during which time period they escaped is not clear. The alternate universe the humans live in follows same laws as our universe, except that it has a

gravitational constant The gravitational constant (also known as the universal gravitational constant, the Newtonian constant of gravitation, or the Cavendish gravitational constant), denoted by the capital letter , is an empirical physical constant involved in ...

which is

orders of magnitude An order of magnitude is an approximation of the logarithm of a value relative to some contextually understood reference value, usually 10, interpreted as the base of the logarithm and the representative of values of magnitude one. Logarithmic dis ...

larger than our own universe. The physics of the alternate universe have slowly turned the nebula into an increasingly hostile environment and the humans, along with the bizarre native species, are suffering the effects of environmental collapse.

References

External links

"Raft", at Worlds Without End.

1991 British novels 1991 science fiction novels British science fiction novels Novels by Stephen Baxter Debut science fiction novels Xeelee Sequence Hard science fiction Grafton (publisher) books Fiction about nebulae 1991 debut novels {{1990s-sf-novel-stub