quote:Originally posted by Vogon Poet: Oh, Baxter. Good God, someone apart from me has brought up a British SF author in this Forum, it's a miracle. . .
I'll also join the club of having read a couple. The Time Machine was decent, Manifold Time was just weird, and there was that Clarke collaboration, The Light of Other Days, which was also decent.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by Lee: I swear, I read my posts and it's like they're by a different person. . .
We still have the piece of your brain we took out: it's in a jar, if you'd like it back as a momento.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by AndrewR: It's in the jar next to the pickled egg, but behind the pickled onion.
Xeelee sounds somewhat like "Gigli"
Xeelee > *.aliens
I've read most of his work. I like his style in that everything is pretty hardcoreSF. The only things I dont like are the mammoth stories. Not my style.
-------------------- Baryonic Lord
Registered: Nov 2004
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by Xeelee: Xeelee > *.aliens
What?
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
-------------------- "I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman, which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Jubal Harshaw
Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
WTF??? and here I thought we had first contact....
Damn you Bones....
-------------------- "You are a terrible human, Ritten." Magnus "Urgh, you are a sick sick person..." Austin Powers A leek too, pretty much a negi.....
Registered: Sep 2000
| IP: Logged
Manan Shah
Ex-Member
posted
A bit more information:
Photino Birds: Lifeforms made of dark matter. The matter consists of the 99% of the mass of the universe, so they are too many to count. There is a problem: All the Suns going nova is bad for them (kills them). So they devise a plan to suck the energy out of every Sun, so they can live in peace.
That of course, is bad for us.
20 billion years ago, Xeelee (baryonic life forms who need the suns, like us) were already the dominant species in the universe, first made contact with these photino birds and discovered what they were up to. Realizing what the birds were after, they started a war, THE war actually, in order to fight them.
They probably realized really quickly that they werent going to defeat the birds, so they sent timeships into the past in order to alter their own genetic history to give themselves more time. Even so, the war will be lost. So they begin construcion of 'The Ring', or the Great Attractor about 10 billion years ago, which is like a gateway to other universes, in order to escape.
Five billion years ago, the photino birds found out about the xeelee project, and began attacking it, however, they did not destroy it before it was completed.
ENTER HUMANS: We are idiots (basically), and eventually we become the dominant species in the universe (besides the xeelee, which are immesurably more powerful, as to be incomparable). Everyone else (including humans) basically try to copy their technology and get by.
So, humans get this crazy idea that xeelee are actually killing the universe (we dont know about the birds) instead of fighting to save it from the real threat. So we start attacking the xeelee too. THankfully, we are not really a threat and after a while (when they get tired of us), they destroy our worlds and lock us up in a box so they can focus on the real fight (against the birds).
Anyway, the xeelee sequence basically documents this, up until 4 billion years in the future, when xeelee at the height of their power and in their full baryonic glory finally admit their defeat and leave the universe through the ring. Soon thereafter, the Ring is destroyed, and the universe dies prematurely (killed off by the birds), forever.
Some bands of humans also make it out of the universe and colonize other universes.
In the end, just a couple conciousness's are left in our current universe to ponder the futility of human existance.
Thats it in a nutshell.
The Xeelee sequence is one of the best works of fiction ever written (in my opinion).
quote:Originally posted by Manan Shah: Thats it in a nutshell.
Mabye it's just the synopsis that makes it sound like ass.
Dark matter birds? Pass.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
This is why I never bothered reading any of the Xeelee books apart from Raft. And wasn't Timelike Infinity a Xeelee book? Or was that by some other author entirely? And I read his newest-but-one book, Evolution: Destiny's Children Book One in all innocence, and now find from reading the back-cover blurb of Exultant (book two) that it is a Xeelee story. I've been robbed!
posted
I believe that all of Baxter's books fit in the sequence, if only tangentially, except for his sequel to The Time Machine. (Cross thread points!) Or maybe even that does.
I'm pretty sure I've never read one, though.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic
