โ Scribed by Stephen Baxter
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Baxters 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.
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. 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. They flee through the eponymous Ring of exotic matter, and some humans will follow them.
Baxters 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. 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.
The best SF author in Britain
SFX
Baxter recalls the most visionary moments of Wells and Clark constructs a human-scale drama out of the most far-reaching implications of current cosmological theory makes E Doc Smith look like a minimalist.
Locus
Baxter sends into free-fall the most awesome ideas in science fiction today What makes these ideas assimilable is the prism of people through which they are refracted good SF reveals the mortal host in the machine.
The Times
THE XEELEE SEQUENCE
Stephen Baxters history of the universe
While the human race struggles against alien oppressors, an even greater epic battle rages between the deadly dark-matter photino birds and their implacable enemy, the Xeelee
These marvellous linked stories bring Baxters widely praised future history to the door at the end of time and space which has been opened by the fabulous Xeelee, the ultimate sentient beings, the most astonishing engineers of all time.
Baxter sends into free-fall the most awesome ideas in science fiction today
THE TIMES
the reaction is that which C.S. Lewis referred to when he described science fiction as the only genuine consciousness expanding drug
NEW SCIENTIST
A fine and important collection
INTERZONE
A luminous collection Baxter can overwhelm you with a traditional SF sense of wonder until your jaw drops
SFX
This books depth almost produces vertigo a classic in the making
EXAMINER
Library : Science Fiction
Universes : The Xeelee Sequence [05]
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 9780061059049
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