Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter is a British author known for his hard sci-fi novels. He's most known for his far-future space opera series The Xeelee Sequence, but he also writes a fair amount of Alternate History and more near-future fiction.

• The Xeelee Sequence series. Arguably his best-known books. Set in the far future, where humans struggle for supremacy in the universe against the god-like Xeelee.
• Evolution, a standalone novel about the evolution of humans and their ultimate fate.
• The Flood series, about an apocalyptic global flood.
• The Manifold series. Three "what if" novels concerning the Fermi Paradox (each presenting a different resolution to the paradox). Notable in that all three novels feature the same cast, but are set in Alternate Continuities.
  • Manifold Time posits that humanity is the only intelligent species in the universe.
  • Manifold Space is the opposite, with the universe actually brimming with intelligent life, but the reason we've never seen it before is because it is periodically "sterilized" by natural cosmological events.
  • Manifold Origin is set in a multiverse that is full of intelligent life, but each universe only contains one intelligent species.
  • Phase Space is a collection of short stories related to the series.
• The Time Odyssey series, in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke. Intended as an "orthoquel" (read: Alternate Universe) to Clarke's famous 2001: A Space Odyssey series.
• The Mammoth trilogy. It's about mammoths.
• Time's Tapestries, an Alternate History series.
• The NASA Trilogy, another Alternate History featuring more modern-day and near future what-ifs, such as a hypothetical manned mission to Mars in the 1970s.
  • Titan, a scarily plausible Twenty Minutes Into the Future book about an expedition to Titan.
• The Time Ships, an authorized sequel to H. G. Wells' The Time Machine that incorporates more modern science fiction concepts, such as Dyson Spheres and time travel creating branching timelines.
  • In an interesting twist, Baxter himself presents it as though it was taken from a lost manuscript by the Time Traveler himself.
• The H-Bomb Girl, a foray into Young Adult fiction; in 1962, a young girl in Liverpool finds herself at a crossroads between various alternate histories against the backdrop of the Cuban Missile Crisis.