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Goldsboro Books

9780246137067

Raft

Raft

by Stephen Baxter

Publisher Grafton

Genre:

Released:

  • Signed by the Author
  • UK First Edition
  • First Printing
  • Hardcover


Regular price £500.00
Regular price Sale price £500.00
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  • Professionally Packed

    All of our books that have a dust wrapper are covered in clear protective, removable film and are packed professionally in bubble wrap and a box for shipping so that they reach you in perfect condition.

  • Book Condition & Notes

    Double signed by the author. One signature inside the first cover, as part of a dedication. Second signature on title page.

    A near-fine first edition, in the original blue binding. In a near-fine, unclipped dust jacket.

About the book

Stephen Baxter's highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence. A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. These can be traded for food from the Raft, a structure built from the wreckage of the ship, on which a small group of scientists preserve the ancient knowledge which makes survival possible. Rees is a Miner whose curiosity about his world makes him stow away on a flying tree -- just one of the many strange local lifeforms -- carrying trade between the Belt and the Raft. Accepted as an apprentice scientist, he learns that their world is dying, and that in order to live these survivors must contemplate a journey even more perilous and fantastic than that of their ancestors.

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About the Author

Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool, England, in 1957 and now lives in Northumberland. Since 1987, he has published somewhere over forty books, mostly science fiction novels, and over a hundred short stories.


Stephen holds degrees in mathematics, from Cambridge University, engineering, from Southampton University, and in business administration, from Henley Management College. He worked as a teacher of maths and physics, and for several years in information technology. Today, he is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society.


His first professionally published short story appeared in 1987, and his first novel, in 1991, becoming a full-time author in 1995. He is also a President of the British Science Fiction Association, and a Vice-President of the HG Wells Society.


Voyage was dramatised by Audio Movies for BBC Radio and broadcast in 1999.


Baxter's TV and movie work includes development work on the BBC's Invasion: Earth, broadcast in April-May 1998, and the script for Episode 3 of Space Island One, broadcast on Sky One on 21 January 1998.

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