Xeelee: redemption

Hope from despair

The engineer heroes of hard SF are not supposed to get cross, but Michael Poole has good reason to be angry. That’s because, as related in Xeelee: Vengeance, he lives in a timeline where a member of the alien Xeelee civilisation destroyed the Solar System, with humanity saved only by Poole taking an audacious gamble.

The sequel finds survivors heading aboard starships for an immense structure at the centre of the galaxy. As Big Dumb Objects go, this one’s a doozy: a ring a light year in circumference. The reason for the journey is simple: revenge.

If the plot of Stephen Baxter’s latest novel, which along with its predecessor acts as an alternate history “pendant” to his Xeelee sequence, is straightforward, that’s just as well, because much of the book is boggling. Special relativity mashes up its timelines – handy for an author who wants to take his characters into the far future.

The sheer scope means Baxter has plenty of space to expound on ideas around physics, evolution and our place in the universe. This might be a little dry, except that Baxter’s sense of wonder, distilled from reading scientific papers so the general reader doesn’t have to, shines through. There’s also the odd nod to his former writing partner Terry Pratchett, which inevitably brings a fuzzy feeling.

As for Poole, he’s a character with limitations, in that he’s driven by his own single-mindedness. It’s something that Baxter perhaps acknowledges by showing us much of what transpires through the eyes of Jophiel Poole, a “Virtual” initially created as Michael’s “disposable copy” and who, rather ironically, develops a more rounded personality than his flesh-and-blood precursor.

It’s less impressive than Baxter’s recent, character-driven fiction (notably the Northland trilogy) but, as revealed in its touching dénouement, a book with big ideas and a big heart. Jonathan Wright

One source is Dark Matter And The Dinosaurs, which explores whether the former caused the latter’s extinction.