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35-443: The Xeelee Sequence ( / ˈ z iː l iː / ; ZEE -lee ) is a series of hard science fiction novels , novellas , and short stories written by British science fiction author Stephen Baxter . The series spans billions of years of fictional history , centering on humanity's future expansion into the universe , its intergalactic war with an enigmatic and supremely powerful Kardashev Type V alien civilization called

70-450: A crucial plot element, the existence of deep pockets of "moondust" in lunar craters, is now known to be incorrect. There is a degree of flexibility in how far from "real science" a story can stray before it leaves the realm of hard SF. Hard science fiction authors only include more controversial devices when the ideas draw from well-known scientific and mathematical principles. In contrast, authors writing softer SF use such devices without

105-528: A fictional timeline stretching from the Big Bang 's singularity of the past to the eventual heat death of the universe and Timelike Infinity ' s singularity of the future. An omnibus edition of the first four Xeelee novels ( Raft , Timelike Infinity , Flux , and Ring ), entitled Xeelee: An Omnibus , was released in January 2010. In August 2016, the entire series of all novels and stories (up to that date)

140-446: A great fan of books that end with cliff-hangers. So you could go in anywhere. One way would be to start with Vacuum Diagrams , a collection that sets out the overall story of the universe. Then Timelike Infinity and Ring which tell the story of Michael Poole, then Raft and Flux which are really incidents against the wider background, and finally Destiny's Children ." Science fiction author Paul J. McAuley has praised Baxter and

175-407: A memory the character could have called to mind at any point, having her think about it just in time to make a key decision may seem like an implausible coincidence . . . " Furthermore, "If the memory is going to prompt a present decision, then the memory in turn must have been prompted by a recent event." In a shared universe more than one author may shape the same backstory. The later creation of

210-533: A scientific basis (sometimes referred to as "enabling devices", since they allow the story to take place). Readers of "hard SF" often try to find inaccuracies in stories. For example, a group at MIT concluded that the planet Mesklin in Hal Clement 's 1953 novel Mission of Gravity would have had a sharp edge at the equator, and a Florida high school class calculated that in Larry Niven 's 1970 novel Ringworld

245-466: A war tactic, through the use of closed timelike curves , resulting in a stalemate for thousands of years. Eventually, humanity develops defensive, movable pocket universes to compartmentalize and process information, and an exotic weapon able to damage the ecological stability of the core's supermassive black hole. Minutes after the first successful strike, the Xeelee withdraw from the galaxy, effectively ceding

280-404: Is a set of events invented for a plot , preceding and leading up to that plot. In acting , it is the history of the character before the drama begins, and is created during the actor's preparation. These terms are also used in espionage. [1] As a literary device , backstory is often employed to lend depth or believability to the main story . The usefulness of having a dramatic revelation

315-456: Is the fiction-writing mode whereby a character calls something to mind, or remembers it. A character's memory plays a role for conveying backstory, as it allows a fiction-writer to bring forth information from earlier in the story or from before the beginning of the story. Although recollection is not widely recognized as a distinct fiction-writing mode, recollection is commonly used by authors of fiction. Orson Scott Card observed that "If it's

350-554: The Milky Way galaxy, after the Xeelee. Unaware of the Photino–Xeelee war and the existential ramifications of what is at stake, humanity come to the (unwarranted) conclusion that the Xeelee are a sinister and destructive threat to their hegemony and security. Through a bitter war of attrition , humans end up containing the Xeelee to the galactic core . Both humans and the Xeelee gain strategic intelligence by using time travel as

385-548: The Xeelee (eldritch symbiotes composed of spacetime defects , Bose-Einstein condensates , and baryonic matter ), and the Xeelee's own cosmos -spanning war with dark matter entities called Photino Birds . The series features many other species and civilizations that play a prominent role, including the Squeem (a species of group-mind aquatics ), the Qax (beings whose biology is based on

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420-507: The "hard science fiction" designation is the relationship of the science content and attitude to the rest of the narrative, and (for some readers, at least) the "hardness" or rigor of the science itself. One requirement for hard SF is procedural or intentional: a story should try to be accurate, logical, credible and rigorous in its use of current scientific and technical knowledge about which technology, phenomena, scenarios and situations that are practically or theoretically possible. For example,

455-514: The Milky Way to fully human control. Humanity continued to advance technologically for a hundred thousand years afterwards, then attacked the Xeelee across the Local Group of galaxies. However, despite having annoyed the Xeelee enough to give up activities in the Milky Way, humans, having become an extremely powerful Type III civilization themselves at this point, prove only to be a minor distraction to

490-531: The Ring) to permit easy travel to other universes, allowing them and other species to escape the Photino Birds' destruction of the universe. The Xeelee, despite their unapproachable aloofness and transcendent superiority, appear to be compassionate and charitable toward the younger and less advanced species that inhabit the universe, demonstrating this by doing such things as constructing a specially made universe suited to

525-509: The Seas in 1870, among other stories. The attention to detail in Verne's work became an inspiration for many future scientists and explorers, although Verne himself denied writing as a scientist or seriously predicting machines and technology of the future. Hugo Gernsback believed from the beginning of his involvement with science fiction in the 1920s that the stories should be instructive, although it

560-598: The Silver Ghosts, who humans had nearly driven to extinction. Humans are likewise shown compassion by them and allowed to use the Ring to escape, despite their relentless long war against the Xeelee. The novels in chronological order (as opposed to publication order) are given below. Some of the novels contain elements occurring at different points in the timeline . The story anthologies ( Vacuum Diagrams , Resplendent , and Xeelee: Endurance ) each contain stories taking place across

595-542: The Xeelee and the Photino Birds, with the latter two being alien species that originated in the early universe . The technologically advanced Xeelee primarily inhabit supermassive black holes , manipulating their event horizons to create preferable living environments, construction materials, tools, and computing devices. The Photino Birds are a dark matter -based species that live in the gravity wells of stars, who are likely not aware of baryonic life forms due to dark matter's weak interactions with normal matter. Due to

630-405: The Xeelee on the whole, being ultimately unable to meaningfully challenge their dominance across the universe. Although the Xeelee are masters of space and time capable of influencing their own evolution, they are ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the Photino Birds. They instead utilize cosmic strings to build an enormous ring-like structure (which comes to be known as Bolder's Ring, or simply

665-587: The complex interactions of convection cells ), and the Silver Ghosts (colonies of symbiotic organisms encased in reflective skins). Several stories in the Sequence also deal with humans and posthumans living in extreme conditions, such as at the heart of a neutron star ( Flux ), in a separate universe with considerably stronger gravity ( Raft ), and within eusocial hive societies ( Coalescent ). The Xeelee Sequence deals with many concepts stemming from

700-427: The development of concrete proposals for spaceships, space stations, space missions, and a US space program in the 1950s and 1960s influenced a widespread proliferation of "hard" space stories. Later discoveries do not necessarily invalidate the label of hard SF, as evidenced by P. Schuyler Miller , who called Arthur C. Clarke 's 1961 novel A Fall of Moondust hard SF, and the designation remains valid even though

735-516: The entire chronology. In 2009, Baxter posted a detailed chronology of the Xeelee Sequence explaining the proper chronological reading order of all the novels, novellas, and short stories up to that year. The timeline was updated in September 2015. When asked directly for a suggested reading order, the author wrote: "I hope that all the books and indeed the stories can be read stand-alone. I'm not

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770-453: The formation of new black holes due to a lack of Type II supernovae , threatening the existence of the Xeelee and their cosmic projects. After overcoming a series of brutal occupations by extraterrestrial civilizations, humanity expands into the galaxy with an extremely xenophobic and militaristic outlook, with aims to exterminate other species they encounter. Humans eventually become the second-most advanced and widespread civilization in

805-452: The fringe of theoretical physics and futurology , such as artificial wormholes , time travel , exotic-matter physics , naked singularities , closed timelike curves , multiple universes , hyperadvanced computing and artificial intelligence , faster-than-light travel , spacetime engineering, quantum wave function beings, and the upper echelons of the Kardashev scale . Thematically,

840-427: The full accent on SCIENCE". In the same editorial, Gernsback called for patent reform to give science fiction authors the right to create patents for ideas without having patent models because many of their ideas predated the technical progress needed to develop specifications for their ideas. The introduction referenced the numerous prescient technologies described throughout Ralph 124C 41+ . The heart of

875-475: The greatest in the history of the genre", according to science fiction historians Peter Nicholls and Mike Ashley. However, Gernsback's views were unchanged. In his editorial in the first issue of Science-Fiction Plus , he gave his view of the modern SF story: "the fairy tale brand, the weird or fantastic type of what mistakenly masquerades under the name of Science-Fiction today!" and he stated his preference for "truly scientific, prophetic Science-Fiction with

910-470: The inevitable risk of their habitats being destroyed by supernovae and other consequences of stellar evolution , the Photino Birds work to halt nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, prematurely aging them into stable white dwarfs . The resulting dwarfs provide them with suitable habitats for billions of times longer than other types of stars could, but at the expense of other forms of life on nearby planets. The Photino Birds' activities also effectively stop

945-462: 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 that are caught up in it. Hard science fiction Stories revolving around scientific and technical consistency were written as early as the 1870s with the publication of Jules Verne 's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under

980-589: The narratives that its vast range of life generates. [It represents an] 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

1015-483: The series deals heavily with certain existential and social philosophical issues, such as striving for survival and relevance in a harsh and unknowable universe, the effects of war and militarism on society, and the effects that come from a long and unpredictable future for humanity with strange technologies. As of August 2018, the series is composed of 9 novels and 53 short pieces (short stories and novellas, with most collected in 3 anthologies ), all of which fit into

1050-488: The series, saying: 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 is 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

1085-460: The story's titular artifact, and in pondering the backstory began to flesh out the basics of what would later become the main players and setting of the Sequence: a universe full of intelligent species that live in the shadow of the incomprehensible and god-like Xeelee. The overarching plot of the Xeelee Sequence involves an intergalactic war between humanity and the Xeelee, and a cosmic war between

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1120-505: The topsoil would have slid into the seas in a few thousand years. Niven fixed these errors in his sequel The Ringworld Engineers , and noted them in the foreword . Films set in outer space that aspire to the hard SF label try to minimize the artistic liberties taken for the sake of practicality of effect. Such considerations to be made when shooting may include: Arranged chronologically by publication year. Backstory A backstory , background story , background , or legend

1155-519: Was not long before he found it necessary to print fantastical and unscientific fiction in Amazing Stories to attract readers. During Gernsback's long absence from science fiction (SF) publishing, from 1936 to 1953, the field evolved away from his focus on facts and education. The Golden Age of Science Fiction is generally considered to have started in the late 1930s and lasted until the mid-1940s, bringing with it "a quantum jump in quality, perhaps

1190-507: Was recognized by Aristotle , in Poetics . Backstories are usually revealed, partially or in full, chronologically or otherwise, as the main narrative unfolds. However, a story creator may also create portions of a backstory or even an entire backstory that is solely for their own use. Backstory may be revealed by various means, including flashbacks , dialogue , direct narration , summary , recollection , and exposition . Recollection

1225-449: Was released as one volume in e-book format entitled Xeelee Sequence: The Complete Series . Baxter's Destiny's Children series is part of the Xeelee Sequence . Baxter first conceived of the Xeelee while hobby writing a short story in the summer of 1986 (eventually published in Interzone as "The Xeelee Flower" the following year). He incorporated powerful off-stage aliens to explain

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