Trying to branch out to new authors, and potentially new series, Stephen Baxter was a name that has come up a fair bit and particularly his "Xeelee" universe novels. I took a chance, aiming to start back at the beginning, with "Raft", from 1991.A quarter century old now, it shows it. Not so much via obsolete direct technological references, which are ducked via context. (Although there is one to a large IBM computer, which stood out). It's more the immaturity of the writing.
The setting is ludicrous in the details of it's physical infeasibility, but a fairly novel premise: what if the gravitational constant, in a parallel universe, was crazy strong, such that cosmology scaled right down to human sizes? Stars the width of towns, 'planets' a few dozen 'yards' across (not sure why he chooses imperial here). Throw a bunch of (former) space faring humans into the mix and what weird, appalling, structures might their descendants inhabit there...?
