![]() ![]() The ground itself began to shimmer, forming pools of luminous, almost liquid dust. Days later, a few specks of moon rock kicked up from the last Apollo mission fell upon a lava crag in Scotland. ![]() As if to commemorate the end of NASA’s golden couple, our neighbor planet exploded into a brilliant cloud of dust and debris, showering the Earth with radiation and bizarre particles as big as bacteriawiping out all the crops and half the life in the oceans, frying the ozone layer, forcing survivors to wear protective suits on city streets. What was that strange light in the sky? A new star? A comet? Neither. It started the night Geena and Henry broke up. There are new and amazing facets of the future here, and the reader can also once more spend time with Michael Poole, the wormhole technology genius from Timelike Infinity with the wonderful Lieserl, modified human being inhabiting the sun with the microscopic humans of the world of Flux with the aliens threatening earth, Sqeeum, Qax, photino birds above all, with the Xeelee. Baxter’s magnificent, mind boggling ideas infuse the stories with enduring meaning and bring with them a sense of perspective married to wonder to be found nowhere else. ![]() They flee through the eponymous Ring of exotic matter, and some humans will follow them. Owners of the universe, the Xeelee, first contact photino birds at the beginning, then flee them at the end, having modified their own evolutionary history in a failed attempt to defeat the birds, creatures of dark matter. ![]() The stories are like pearls on the timeline of the sequence, which stretches from the formation of life in the quagma to the virtual extinction of baryonic life in this universe. Timelike Infinity: the strange region at the end of time where the Xeelee, owners of the universe, are waiting…īaxter’s future history, known as the Xeelee sequence, is an exemplar of the form: it comprises his first four novels, Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux and Ring, and these marvellous linked stories. Michael Poole, architect of the tunnel, must boldly confront the consequences of his genius. For these men and women from the future are themselves dangerous fanatics in pursuit of their own bizarre quantum grail. When a small group of humans in a makeshift craft outwit the Qax to escape to the past through the tunnel, it is not to warn the people of Earth against the Qax, who are sure to follow them. Made from exotic matter, it is humanity’s greatest engineering project in the pre Qax era, where the other end of the tunnel remains anchored near Jupiter. Into this new dark age appears the end of a tunnel through time. Earth became a vast factory for alien foodstuffs. Immortality drugs were confiscated, the human spirit crushed. Then there were bad times: Earth was occupied by the faceless, brutal Qax. 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.įirst there were good times: humankind reached glorious heights, even immortality. 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. 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. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. 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. 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. Stephen Baxter’s highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence. ![]()
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