Xeelee Sequence

About the Xeelee Sequence series

Stephen Baxter's signature achievement is a hard-SF future history spanning from the near future to the death of the universe and beyond, built around the Xeelee, an ancient, almost incomprehensibly advanced species locked in a cosmic-scale war against dark matter creatures for control of the universe's baryonic matter -- a war humanity discovers it is, at best, a minor participant in. Raft (1991), Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993) and Ring (1994) form the core of the original sequence, each following different, disconnected pockets of a scattered human diaspora across wildly different physical settings -- a universe with anomalously strong gravity, a generation ship gone catastrophically wrong, engineered symbiotic life inside a star -- unified by Baxter's commitment to genuinely rigorous physics extrapolated to its most extreme and alien conclusions.

The two collections, Vacuum Diagrams (1997) and Xeelee: Endurance (2015), gather the short fiction that fills in the timeline's vast gaps, while Xeelee: Vengeance (2017) and Xeelee: Redemption (2018) returned to the sequence after a long gap to close out the war's endgame. Baxter has said the books can be entered almost anywhere -- this is avowedly not a conventional series with a fixed reading order -- which makes it one of the more demanding but rewarding future-history projects in modern hard SF, closer in ambition to Olaf Stapledon than to space opera as usually practiced.