''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 Novemb ...

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 pu ...

and the first book in the

Xeelee Sequence The ''Xeelee Sequence'' (; ) is a series of hard science fiction novels, novellas, and short stories written by British science fiction author Stephen Baxter (author), Stephen Baxter. The series spans billions of years of Future history, fictiona ...

, 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 Newton's law of universal gravitation describes gravity as a force by stating that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the sq ...

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 (; 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 regions, such as in the Pillars of Creation in ...

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 the same laws as our universe, except that it has a

gravitational constant The gravitational constant is an empirical physical constant involved in the calculation of gravitational effects in Sir Isaac Newton's law of universal gravitation and in Albert Einstein's general relativity, theory of general relativity. It ...

which is

orders of magnitude In a ratio scale based on powers of ten, the order of magnitude is a measure of the nearness of two figures. Two numbers are "within an order of magnitude" of each other if their ratio is between 1/10 and 10. In other words, the two numbers are wi ...

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