This novel was something of a shocker to me. I actually expected a continuation of Coalescent with the hive-mind Romans even if they take place in the near future with more George Poole or perhaps a future Michael Poole, but nothing could be farther from this.

(Not ENTIRELY true, actually, the hive-mind humans and a remnant 20-thousand-year-old near-immortal in Exultant gave us some continuity.)

But in actual fact, Exultant reads more like a bonafide Xeelee novel. As in, pulling together all the Time-Like Infinity short stories, references to Flux, Ring, and even a hint of what could come in some of the others.

We jump right out of the past and into the deep future after two great expansions of humanity across the galaxy and 20k years into an ongoing rear-guard near-retreat against the inscrutable Xeelee project that herds stars into the center of the galaxy to make the super black hole in its center ever larger.

Humanity is losing the war. Barely bringing the Xeelee to a stalemate, we've bred ourselves into a race of children designed to fight a losing war. For 20 THOUSAND years.

Not everyone thinks this is admirable or smart, however, and this is where the novel starts. Expect all the timey-wimey stuff of Baxter's other novels. Closed Time-Like Loops are a major plot point and I think it's gorgeous. Closed-Time-Like computing, especially. Cuts down on the wear and tear of the computers. :)

Moreover, this novel gives us one of the most epic moments in all of Baxter's future history, the push and last hurrah against the super black hole, the big reveal about the Xeelee's purpose, and THEIR great enemy.

Since I was already familiar with some of these events explained in retrospect in the other novels, I thought it was something of a really cool treat to see it up close and personal.

I may have been surprised with this novel, expecting something else, but what I ACTUALLY got was better. It was just... kinda out of the blue. Maybe it should have been billed as a direct Xeelee novel, marketed as one of the great and gorgeous battles of a galaxy-spanning mankind against a race who thinks we're less than vermin and aren't to be bothered with communicating with us. :) ( )

subtlety, intriguing, riveting. Non doctrinal till the end!
( )

This book is only slightly better than its prequel. In the far future, humanity has conquered the galaxy, exterminated several other alien races and eliminated dissension, except for the war with the Xeelee. That war has been at a stalemate for centuries and just keeps on going, with a government and society in place to make sure it stays that way. Humanity has become a hive like culture where people are bred just to be fed into the war, until a few misfits finally figure out a way to stop it - at considerable cost. The writing is good and the characters are at least somewhat interesting, but I found his society untenable and not very interesting. The physics theories are interesting but just a little on the wild side. ( )

The last section integrating the History of the Universe and the story of the earlier races makes up for the rest of the story that felt so unnatural: trench warfare don't mix so well with starships. An amazing number of new ideas, but the story just didn't do it for me. ( )

Stephen Baxter's Exultant is marketed as Book Two of Destiny's Children.

Actually, Transcendent - Book Three in the series follows the stories and characters from Coalescent (Book 1). Coalescent covers the timeline from the fall of the Roman Empire in England up to the present. Transcendent (Book 3) follows the characters and events of Coalescent into the near future. Exultant is placed 25,000 years in the future from the timeline of Transcendent's world and makes only trivial reference to the events of the other two books.

The primary sciences of Coalsescent and Transcendent are evolutionary biology and sociobiology. The main sciences in Exultant are cosmology and astrophysics relating to black holes and space-time. These are from Baxter's area of scientific specialization, although some of the biology from the other two books is also extended. More importantly, he also introduces some ideas close to my own academic research program about the emergence in complex environments of self-organizing systems. He posits that life can emerge within any kind of physical system that offers sufficient complexity (e.g., assemblies of quarks). He also makes the case that the speed of evolution is directly related to the speed of particle interactions. Thus, there was time in the first millisecond of the big bang for sentient cultures to evolve, and that the phase changes as the universe unfolded were major crises for these early forms of life.

Baxter's characters may at times be a bit wooden, but I am fascinated by the science he weaves into his stories.