On Stephen Baxter's Manifold books

So I finished Stephen Baxter's World Engines duology yesterday. I have some thoughts.

Setting aside its excruciatingly slow pace, it neatly ties back to Baxter's another series — the Manifold trilogy.

The 3 books of the trilogy are not sequential, but only thematically connected.

Each book attempts to resolve Fermi's paradox — we live around one septillion (24 zeroes after 1) stars. So its highly likely that the intelligent alien life somewhere. Then why haven't we come across some evidence for it?

The first book — Manifold: Time — concludes that we are truly alone. Humanity and its creations live on until the death of the universe, but never finds other intelligent lifeforms. Life on Earth is a rarest of the rare exception (which, by the way, we seem to be squandering instead of cherishing). Pretty dour end.

The second book — Manifold: Space — hypothesises that intelligent life is actually everywhere, but regular cosmic—level catastrophes wipes a civilisation out before they get to live long enough to come across another celestial civilisation.

The third book — Manifold: Origin — digs deep into the term Manifold, and veers into multiverse. It suggests that humans and their creations are indeed the only intelligent lifeforms, but we are segregated across different universes, so can't find each other without divine intervention from our advanced future selves.

Apparently not content with the conclusion, Baxter wrote the World Engines duology, where he extrapolates the first and third books, Time and Origin. Our descendants, close to the death of the universe, are determined to do something about us being the only intelligent lifeforms in the universe. They reach back through time to reshape the universe into a multiverse, thus allowing creation of several Earths. Then they seed these Earths with the original Earth's life, thus allowing life to evolve on diverse paths.

Such a grand concept, muted by weak characters and uninteresting and slow writing.

I think its time for me to take a break from Baxter. I cherish his Flood, Ark, Landfall trilogy. I think his Evolution should be a part of our school curriculum. But I cannot, for the life of me, slog through his recent novels anymore.