Xeelee: Endurance - Stephen Baxter

Return to the eon-spanning and universe-crossing conflict between humanity and the unknowable alien Xeelee in this selection of uncollected and unpublished stories, newly edited and placed in chronological reading order.

From tales charting the earliest days of man's adventure to the stars to stories of Old Earth, four billion years in the future, the range and startling imagination of Baxter is always on display. As humanity rises and falls, ebbs and flows, one thing is always needed - the ability to endure.

Contains eleven short stories and novellas.

My thoughts:

A couple of novellas, a couple of short stories, spanning billions of years of mankind's expansion of space. I did say I wanted to try more sci-fi, and branch out in my sci.fi. I think I have done pretty well over the summer with that.

Return to Titan

I was hooked  at once, and the end. Omg. The end! I wanna know more. But this is just the early days of space exploration. And this trip was about the Moon Titan. Intriguing and good.

Spacefall

The first galactic war. So I get why the war began, still asshole way of doing it.

Remembrance

This was a good one. I could not stop reading. The squeem came and conquered earth. It was hellish.

Endurance

The Qax occupation. Poor earth, but they do seem better than the Squeem.

The seer and the silverman

Humans are free and they are now the conquerors. And they are not nicer than the ones that conquered them.

Gravity Dreams

Ad 978,225. They find people in a beta universe.

Periondry's quest

AD 3,8 billion years. Humans are turning creepy and weird.

Climbing the blue

Earth is so weird now. The rest of space seems to be lost.

The time pit

We are now so far into the future that I can not relate to them as humans, even though they are.

The lowland expedition

As in a few earlier stories, earth has time zones (in an effort to same them from aliens). And by this I mean that if you go up you can be away for 40 years, but only 1 year pass below. And in this story they visit a timepit and find strange strange things. Earth is messed up!!

Formidable caress

5 billions years.

As time pass humans seem to be going backwards. Technology lost and found again. Nothing new getting done. Buildings are alive and ruling. Scary future.

As you can see, the more time that passed, the more bizarre it got. Humans had spread back over the universe, and then they died and earth was left. But humans stayed as before. Idiots all of them.

Conclusion:

I could not put it down. First there were invasions. Then we invaded space. Then things got weird. So interesting.

Cover

it does look sci.fi

Hardcover, 448 pages
Expected publication: September 17th 2015
Sci fi
For review