author : Stephen Baxter

Stephen Baxter's ambitious Xeelee sequence spans the entire lifetime of the universe. This collection of short stories, some of which are extensively fixed-up from their first publication, highlights moments from that history. At the end a useful timeline helps to keep the reader oriented.

If you like your stories short on characterisation, but long on hard science, with the odd paragraph of lecturing thrown in here and there -- "A complex massive Klein-Gordon scalar field will be produced, with no self-interaction save through gravity..." -- then these are for you. I particularly enjoyed the early "hard biology" stories, set a couple of thousand years in the future, with humans exploring the Solar System, and finding bizarre life forms everywhere. (These to me felt like a cross between Stanley Weinbaum and Bob Forward.) The latter stories veer more towards "hard physics" tales, as the war between baryonic life and dark matter life results in some mind-boggling engineering feats.

I have a few small niggles: I find it hard to believe that in 3500 years' time, people will still have names like Eve and Jack, and that they will talk in terms of the Lynden-Bell analysis of the Jeans instability, and other 20th century physics concepts. But these are fairly minor quibbles: the stories are fun and interesting.

Contents (possible spoilers)

• The Sun-People. 1993. = The Sun-Person

Sculptor 472 is born in changing times. The Sun People are destroying their way of life.

• The Logic Pool. 1994

Godel's incompleteness theorem shows we will always be able to add new axioms to our mathematical systems: but which ones should we add?

• Gossamer. 1995

Pluto and Charon are tidally locked -- which might allow an interesting evolutionary development.

• Cilia-of-Gold. 1994

One crater on sun-scorched Mercury is always in the dark, safe from the sun.

• Lieserl. 1993

There's something wrong with the sun, so Lieserl has to grow up fast.

• Pilot. 1993. = ~~ Chiron

Anna Gage goes to Chiron, and then even further, to escape the Squeem Occupation.

• The Xeelee Flower. 1987

How Jones made a discovery that helped end the Squeem Occupation.

• More Than Time or Distance. 1988

A human and an alien discover a Xeelee instantaneous communication artifact -- who will get to keep this priceless treasure?

• The Switch. 1990

Xenotechnologists are always on hand to look for Xeelee artifacts, but aren't always the most popular crew members.

• Blue Shift. 1989

Jim Bolder is employed by the Qax to fly a Xeelee ship to the Great Attractor.

• The Quagma Datum. 1989

Luce investigates the ancient Lithium-7 event, beating the Silver Ghosts to the race by using the new Supersymmetry drive.

• Planck Zero. 1992

Jack Raoul discovers the Silver Ghosts are experimenting with quagma, which might bring down the wrath of the Xeelee on everyone.

• The Godel Sunflowers. 1992

What is the secret of the giant Snowflake artifact?

• Vacuum Diagrams. 1990

The strange human Paul is linked somehow to the Xeelee "Sugar Lump" -- a giant cubical artifact.

• Stowaway. 1991. = (rev. from Raft)

Rees is born a miner, seemingly condemned to a short harsh life in cripplingly high gravity. But he stows away on the strange supply vessel.

• The Tyranny of Heaven. 1990

The enormous star fleet, the Exaltation of the Integrality, makes its way to Bolder's Ring, preaching a message of peace with the Xeelee to all it finds on its way.

• Hero. 1995

Modified humanity has regressed after the Core Wars, but there is still a Hero with his suit to save people.

• Shell. 1987. = ~~ The Bark Spaceship

Young Allel dreams of travelling from Home to the Shell overhead.

• The Eighth Room. 1989

The Sun is cooling, dying. Teal tries to fix it, but fails. Then his grandmother Allel tells him of the fabled Eighth Room in the north

• Secret History. 1991

The Xeelee project is complete, and Paul discovers what the Sugar Lump is for.

• The Baryonic Lords. 1991

Erwal rediscovers the Eighth Room, and the waiting spaceship. But she doesn't know that the Qax are lying in wait.

• Eve. 1996. = The Soliton Star

Linking story used as (very slight) glue to hold the rest together as a future history.

BTW, folks would better off dipping their heads in a bucket of liquid N2 and battering them against a tree very very hard than reading Baxter's Titan. It would not surprise me if reading that book causes birth defects. ... This is the sort of book that justifies fatwahs. If WWIII occured right now, we could die happy knowing Baxter would never write again. If a dinosaur killing asteroid was headed for Earth and I knew Baxter had another book coming up, I would campaign for letting the rock hit, since it is obviously the work of a benovelent deity trying to save us from another Titan. -- James Nicoll, rec.arts.sf.written, 1998

Contents (possible spoilers)

• Traces. 1991

• Darkness. 1995

• The Droplet. 1989

• No Longer Touch the Earth. 1993

• Mittelwelt. 1998

• Journey to the King Planet. 1990

• The Jonah Mna. 1989

• Downstream. 1993

• The Blood of Angels. 1994

• Columbiad. 1996

• Brigantia's Angels. 1995

• Weep for the Moon. 1992

• Good News. 1994

• Something for Nothing. 1988

• In the Manner of Trees. 1992

• Pilgrim 7. 1993

• Zemlya. 1996

• Moon Six. 1997

• George and the Comet. 1991

• Inherit the Earth. 1992

• In the MSOB. 1996

• Novacon 30 panel discussion of What's Hot and What's Not

Oh and while Titan is so bad you will wish you had been swarmed by fire ants and consumed entirely, it is Tolstoy compared to his book about the noble mammoths struggling with the evil vodka swilling post-Soviet Russians ... -- James Nicoll, rec.arts.sf.written, 2000

• 2Kon panel discussion of the Arthur C Clarke Awards shortlist

• Concourse panel discussion of the Arthur C Clarke Awards shortlist