Talk:Raft (novel)

Novel review
I know of an off-site review of this page at http://srehn.com/books/sb_raft.html but I feel it would be dishonest for me to link to it because it's on my site.

If anybody else feels it's appropriate to put that link there, do so, but I won't.

Naming
Would it be more appropriate for this to be at "Raft (novel)" rather than the o'er prolix "Raft (Stephen Baxter)"? More standard as well. --maru  (talk)  contribs 19:32, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

Errata
Although Baxter claims that the Raft universe has a gravitational constant approximately one billion times greater than ours (i.e. approximately 6.67*10^-2 instead of 6.67*10^-11), such a constant would mean that a 100 kg (220 pounds) human would exert more than one gee of acceleration on the blood in his own extremities just from the attraction of his own body mass. Two people lying against each other would barely be capable of pushing off from each other's gravity wells without requiring a superhuman strength-to-mass ratio. Likewise, a one-meter diameter sphere of solid iron (mass of approximately four tonnes) would exert over ONE HUNDRED gees of acceleration at its surface--a human stuck to this modestly-sized object would have his own skeleton crushed by the gravity after a few seconds. Baxter's 300-meter diameter iron asteroid (said to be a fragment of a burnt-out star) would have a surface gravity of approximately 300 times as great, or THIRTY THOUSAND gees. Granted, Baxter stated that the asteroid was full of voids like a sponge, but to get his stated four to five gees of surface gravity, it would have to be over 99.9% hollow. Indeed, a volume of air the size of the asteroid, at the density of Earth sea level air, would exert an attraction of more than three gees.

Given the gap between the gravity calculated from his stated "one billion times greater" gravitational constant and the attractions shown in the story, I think that Baxter intended for gravity to be one million times greater in the Raft universe than in ours, not one billion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.245.37.196 (talk) 08:00, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Connection to Xeelee Sequence
The article says that Raft is not directly linked with the rest of the Xeelee Sequence, but I thought that we were given to understand that the colonists in Raft were some of the humans who passed through the Great Attractor in Ring, and they had the bad luck to wind up in their particular universe? --maru  (talk)  contribs 02:47, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

"' The high-gravitation alternate universe mentioned in Chapter 32 is explored in my novel Raft. The career of Michael Poole, first referred to in Chapter 2, is the heart of my novel Timelike Infinity. The neutron star colonization project discovered in Chapter 29 is described fully in my novel Flux.'"

(Author's Note to Ring.)

From Chapter 32:

"'And in this particular case?' she asked heavily. He closed his eyes. Louise could see that stray pixels, yellow and purple, were again migrating across the Virtual images of his cheeks. His eyes snapped open, startling her. 'High gravity,' he said. 'What?' 'Variation of the laws. In the neighboring universe, the constant of gravity is high — enormously high — compared to, uh, here.' Morrow looked nervous. 'What would that mean? Would we be crushed?' More pixels, glitches in the image, trekked across Mark's cheeks. 'No. But human bodies would have discernible gravity fields. You could feel Louise's mass, Morrow, with a pull of about half a gee.' Morrow looked even more alarmed. 'Stars could be no more than a mile wide, and they would burn for only a year,' Mark said. 'Planets the size of Earth would collapse under their own weight immediately...' Lieserl frowned. 'Could we survive there?' Mark shrugged. 'I don't know. The lifedome would implode immediately under its own weight. We'd need to find a source of breathable air, and fast. And we'd have to live in free fall; any sizeable mass would exert unbearably high gravitational forces. But maybe we could make some kind of raft of the wreckage of the Northern...' Lieserl looked up into the singularity plane, and her expression softened. 'We know there have been human assaults in the Ring — like the neutron star missile. So perhaps we are not the first human pilgrims to fall through the Ring. Mark, you said the bridge to the other universe goes through cycles. I wonder if there are humans on the other side of that interface even now, clinging to rafts made from wrecked warships, struggling to survive in their high-gravity world...'"

--Gwern (contribs) 15:51 20 June 2009 (GMT)