Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter (November 13, 1957) is a science fiction writer born in Liverpool (United Kingdom).

Biography

Baxter has a degree in mathematics from Cambridge University and engineering from Southampton University. He has worked as a math and physics teacher, and several years in information technology. In 1991 he tried to be an astronaut, but failed the tests at an early stage. In 1995 he devoted himself full time to writing.

Literary career

Baxter had been trying to publish for 15 years without success when his story The Xeelee Flower appeared in 1987 in Interzone magazine. This story also marks the first appearance of the Xeelee, the alien race around which the Xeelee series (the Xeelee Sequence in the original in English) revolves, which covers a good part of his initial literary production. Other works that are part of this series are Raft (1991) ―based on a story published in Interzone in 1989―, Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993), Ring (1994) and the short story collection Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence (1997). The latter collects much of his short fiction about the Xeelee, and its American paperback edition received the Philip K. Dick Award in 1999.

As a science fiction author, he is classified within hard science fiction, and has been considered the successor to the figure of Arthur C. Clarke, with whom he has even participated in the writing of the novel Luz de other days.

Baxter has often been cited as one of the leading examples of the revival of both hard science fiction and space opera at the turn of the century XXI, and works of his appear in the anthologies The Hard SF Renaissance (2002) and The Space Opera Renaissance (2006).

Much of his production, such as the Xeelee cycle, is still unpublished in Spanish, focusing on the translations of his two steampunk novels, such as Antihielo and The ships of time, tributes to Jules Verne and H. G. Wells respectively.

Baxter has won several awards including the 1996 John W. Campbell Memorial for Time Ships and several Hugo and Nebula nominations

Work

• Antihielo (1993)
• The ships of time (1995)
• Light of other days (2000) with Arthur C. Clarke
• Evolution (2002)
• Flood (2008) ISBN 978-0575080584 (in English version)
• Ark (2009) ISBN 978-0575080577 (in English version)
• Next (2013) ISBN 978-0575116832 (in English version)
• The Massacre of Mankind (2017) ISBN 978-1473205093 (in English version)
• The Earth Longalong with Terry Pratchett. Published between 2012 and 2018, it consists of books: The Earth Long, The Long War, The Long Sea, The Utopia Larga and The Cosmos Largo.