Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring

Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

NON-FICTION

Deep Future

FICTION

Mammoth
Longtusk
Icebones
Behemoth

Reality Dust
Evolution

Flood Ark

THE WEB

Gulliverzone
Webcrash

DESTINY’S CHILDREN

Coalescent
Exultant
Transcendent
Resplendent

A TIME ODYSSEY (with Arthur C. Clarke)

Time’s Eye
Sunstorm
Firstborn

TIME’S TAPESTRY

Emperor
Conqueror
Navigator
Weaver

 
 
 

 
Xeelee: An Omnibus

 

 
STEPHEN BAXTER

 
 
Orion

A Gollancz eBook

Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2010

Introduction © Paul McAuley 2009
Raft © Stephen Baxter 1991
Timelike Infinity © Stephen Baxter 1992
Flux © Stephen Baxter 1993
Ring © Stephen Baxter 1994
All rights reserved.

The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author of this work, and the right of Paul McAuley to be identified as the author of the introduction, has been asserted by them in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This omnibus first published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company

This eBook first published in 2010 by Gollancz.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN : 978 0 5750 9044 6

This eBook produced by Jouve, France

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

To my wife, Sandra

W
hile many science fiction authors have written serial stories or novels that share the same backdrop and characters, only a handful have constructed meticulously imagined, chronologically consistent future histories that encompass substantial vistas of time and space, and of those future histories, few are as ambitious as Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee Sequence.

The first true future history was created by Olaf Stapledon in his novels
Last and First Men, Last Men in London
, and
The Star Maker
, starting in the teeming metropolis at the heart of the British Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, and accelerating through aeons and galaxies to a final encounter with the being at the heart of creation. It’s a masterpiece, but a chilly one, its story of the evolution of symbiotic cosmic consciousness visionary but remote from ordinary human concerns. A few years later, in the pages of
Astounding Science Fiction
magazine, Robert A. Heinlein charted a smaller scale but no less ambitious future history that, beginning the day after tomorrow, conscientiously chronicled mankind’s climb from the cradle of the Earth to the near stars. The long evolutionary and cosmological perspectives of Stapledon (and H.G. Wells) have been absorbed and developed by many British writers, most notably Arthur C. Clarke, and Greg Bear and Robert Reed have given them an American slant, but Heinlein’s model has provided the blueprint for most subsequent science fictional future histories because it easily accommodates the kind of genre-friendly stories of enterprise and boldness that are dwarfed to irrelevance by Stapledon’s cosmological Agape. The future histories of Poul Anderson, James Blish, C.J. Cherryh, and Larry Niven, amongst others, derive much of their structures and tropes from Heinlein’s pioneering framework. Baxter’s Xeelee Sequence owes something to Heinlein too, with its hard SF extrapolations and vigorous straight-from-the-heart-of-genre story of humanity’s ascension to the centre of the galactic stage, but it skilfully blends those core SF tropes with cosmological perspectives rivalled only by those of Olaf Stapledon (like Stapledon, Baxter was born in Liverpool) to create something new and different: an ambitious and ferociously detailed future history whose span is no less than that of the entire universe, from the Big Bang twenty billion years ago, through some ten million years of human history, to the long, slow dying of the light that dwindles away into timelike infinity.

Stephen Baxter has also published the Victorian alternate history
Anti-Ice
, and
The Time Ships
, a very fine hard SF sequel to H.G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
. He’s written a trilogy of novels based on extrapolations of NASA plans and technology; a series about a species of intelligent mammoth; an alternate near-future trilogy revolving around a space entrepreneur; a stand-alone novel,
Evolution
, that chronicles the story of the development of the human species from dinosaur-dodging burrowers to simplified far-future descendants; and an ongoing series of apocalyptic novels in which Earth is flooded with water kilometres deep. He’s also published novels in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke, a biography of the pioneering Scottish geologist James Hutton, and a series of essays about the future. The list is by no means comprehensive. Restless, energetic, and ambitious, he is fast becoming the contemporary default voice of British SF, and the novels and stories of the Xeelee Sequence constitute his masterwork.

The universe of the Xeelee Sequence teems with life: life, and the evolution of self-aware consciousness, are as fundamental as the Planck constant, the speed of light, the strength of the electromagnetic force, or the Newtonian constant of gravitation. Life arises wherever it can and invariably gives rise to Mind; Mind seeks to spread everywhere and to survive for as long as possible. And by everywhere, I mean
everywhere
: an entire civilisation evolves and seeks refuge in the yoctoseconds after the Big Bang before symmetry is broken and the laws of physics crystallise; other strange and wonderful empires rise and fall before the quagma froth cools enough to allow creation of baryonic and dark matter, and the beginning of a great war between the Xeelee, powerful champions of life based on ordinary atoms and electrons, and the patient and inscrutable dark matter photino birds. Twenty billion years pass before the war between the Xeelee and the photino birds intersects with human history, and humans painstakingly claw their way up from the status of lowly pawns in the hands of enigmatic and casually cruel alien species to great players on the universal stage.

Of that very first species of intelligent being, the monads, Baxter remarks ‘[they] cared nothing for humans, of course, or for quagmites, or Xeelee, or photino birds, or any of the rest of the universe’s menagerie at this or any other age. But they like their universes to have
story
; and it was living things that generated the most interesting sagas.’ It could stand as a credo for the entire Xeelee sequence. Baxter doesn’t shrink from tackling the dismayingly inhuman implications of vast abysses of past or future time, but the universality of life introduces perspective, motion and plot into every part of his Stapledonian cosmological framework. It’s great, heady, mind-bending stuff, meticulously mapped onto cutting edge speculations about the birth pangs of the universe and the ultimate fate of all known time and space, constantly enlivened and driven forward by the narratives that its vast range of life generates.

Baxter introduced the Xeelee Sequence in 1987 with his first published short story, ‘The Xeelee Flower’, and explored its entire timeline in two of the novels collected here,
Timelike Infinity
and
Ring
, and more than twenty short stories that were later linked and expanded into the novel
Vacuum Diagrams
. The other novels in this omnibus,
Raft
and
Flux
, are self-contained narratives islanded within the framework of the future history.
Raft
describes a civilisation founded by shipwrecked spacefarers who stumbled into an alternate universe where the gravitational constant is stronger;
Flux
is the story of microscopic inhabitants of a neutron star who discover that they are part of a grand but flawed scheme to attack the Xeelee’s most ambitious project. A timeline at the end of this volume sets these works in their chronological context.

These early works fully embody Baxter’s virtues: a swift narrative pace; transparent, uncluttered prose; vivid characters defined by action rather than introspection; and above all, accomplished and imaginative exploration, expansion and reworking of SF’s core themes. His characters contest for living space with a panoply of bizarre aliens in a galaxy crammed with ancient wonders and secret histories; his stories reinvent the baroque excesses of space opera and brace them with imaginative exploration of ideas from stellar zoology, cosmology, quantum theory, exotic mathematics, and much else. Narratives froth with moments of shock and awe, and those sudden reversals of scale that induce the metaphysical dizziness sometimes called sense of wonder. Sentences stride confidently across centuries; paragraphs encompass millennia. Individual voices carry the story forwards, but the story is always bigger than the individuals who are caught up in it. And these voices often have a distinctively British accent. Baxter’s sympathies more often lie with chippy but doggedly competent scientists, engineers, and common soldiers than officers, self-made billionaires, or politicians of any stripe; there are overt references to Brunel and echoes of the history and equipage of the British Empire; and above all, his narratives are infused with the elegiac tone characteristic of British SF. While there’s a constant sense of the indefatigable endurance of human spirit characteristic of genre narrative, it isn’t the can-do optimism and frontier heroism of much American SF, but a calm and sober perspective that wryly acknowledges its small but significant place in the cosmological drama. In the long run, as Baxter’s most enduring character, Michael Poole, discovers, time triumphs over all.