Xeelee [series]
Entry updated 8 May 2015. Tagged: Community.
Future History Series created by Stephen Baxter (whom see for further discussion), extending over a vast Time Abyss from beginning to end of our universe. Though early stories like Baxter's debut "The Xeelee Flower" (Spring 1987 Interzone) recall the colourful inventiveness and Thought-Experiment ingenuity of Larry Niven's better Known Space tales, there is something of Olaf Stapledon's cosmological chilliness in the gradual revelation that human history is no more than a side issue – and our interventions an annoying distraction – in the long War between the godlike Alien Xeelee (both Forerunners and contemporaries) and star-dwelling "photino bird" entities who are reshaping the universe (see Terraforming) into a better home for their non-baryonic life, to the detriment of all races including humanity, the Xeelee and many others made of familiar baryonic matter. Fought since before the formation of our Sun, the war ends with photino victory millions of years hence; as emerges in Ring (1994) and other stories, the greatest Xeelee Macrostructure, a Ring over ten million light-years across built from cosmic string, is essentially an escape hatch from our doomed universe. [DRL]
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