Teaser

For twenty thousand years, humanity has warred against the Xeelee. A war that has shaped civilisation, consuming countless billions of lives. Now there is a chance to end the war. But what price victory . . ?

Review

Earlier this year, I finally wrapped up Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee series. By which I mean, the seven novels and one short story collection explicitly labelled as being part of the Xeelee saga. There was, however, still a gap in my collection. The Destiny’s Children quartet features four books also set in the Xeelee universe. Well, multiverse, if you want to be technical about it. The point is that these four books expand the Xeelee story. Like a lot of Baxter’s work, the books each work as standalones, so when I stumbled across a copy of the second book, Exultant, I had no problems picking it up and reading it without the context the first book undoubtedly provides.

I like hard SF. I like big concepts. I like books that tickle my brain and encourage me to think. I like dense books.

But wow, Exultant is a dense book. It’s nearly five hundred pages, and I understood perhaps one half of them. This is a book so loaded with scientific terminology and theoretical physics that I could feel my brain fizzling out as I read it. I confess, I felt slightly stupid at times. Right now is one of those times. The lingering effect of all that brain-fizzling is that now, a week later, I’m not sure I understood enough of the book to fairly review it. But perhaps that in itself is a fair review. Exultant is rich, deep, and complex. And perhaps I am none of these things.

The other thing that Exultant is, is dark. Very, very dark. Grimdark, some might say. It’s set in a galaxy shaped and ravaged by war between humanity and the Xeelee. A war that has dragged on for tens of thousands of years with no signs of slowing down. Into this we meet a fighter pilot called Pirius, who soon meets his future self. The two Piriuses are then sent on a mission that could end the war. The character work does get lost amid all the heady science, but Pirius makes for a decent narrative core in both his past and future self. The story of Pirius and his temporal twin is unrelentingly bleak, and even a little lacking in Baxter’s usual sense of cosmic optimism. The darkest part of the Xeelee sequence I’ve read to date, but not dark enough to put me off reading more in the future.

The best part, by far, is the deep history unveiled in the third part of the book. Baxter details the origins of the universe, second by second. It’s an act of pure worldbuilding that is written with such clarity and precision, that I would happily have read this cluster of chapters as a standalone novella. It’s truly excellent stuff.

Exultant is not my favourite Baxter novel. It’s not even my favourite Xeelee novel. But if you’re after some bleak and science-heavy storytelling, there are definitely worse places to look.

Book Stats

• Destiny’s Children #2
• Published in 2004
• 497 Pages