Xeelee Sequence

{{anchor|Origins}}

Baxter first conceived of the Xeelee while hobby writing a short story in the summer of 1986 (eventually published in Interzone as "The Xeelee Flower" the following year). He incorporated powerful off-stage aliens to explain the story's titular artifact, and in pondering the backstory began to flesh out the basics of what would later become the main players and setting of the Sequence: a universe full of intelligent species that live in the shadow of the incomprehensible and god-like Xeelee.{{cite web |title=The Origin of the Xeelee Universe |url=http://www.stephen-baxter.com/articles.html#xee |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160331233619/http://www.stephen-baxter.com/articles.html#xee |archive-date=31 March 2016 |access-date=1 April 2016 |work=stephen-baxter.com}}

The overarching plot of the Xeelee Sequence involves an intergalactic war between humanity and the Xeelee, and a cosmic war between the Xeelee and the Photino Birds, with the latter two being alien species that originated in the early universe. The technologically advanced Xeelee primarily inhabit supermassive black holes, manipulating their event horizons to create preferable living environments, construction materials, tools, and computing devices. The Photino Birds are a dark matter-based species that live in the gravity wells of stars, who are likely not aware of baryonic life forms due to dark matter's weak interactions with normal matter. Due to the inevitable risk of their habitats being destroyed by supernovae and other consequences of stellar evolution, the Photino Birds work to halt nuclear fusion in the cores of stars, prematurely aging them into stable white dwarfs. The resulting dwarfs provide them with suitable habitats for billions of times longer than other types of stars could, but at the expense of other forms of life on nearby planets. The Photino Birds' activities also effectively stop the formation of new black holes due to a lack of Type II supernovae, threatening the existence of the Xeelee and their cosmic projects.

After overcoming a series of brutal occupations by extraterrestrial civilizations, humanity expands into the galaxy with an extremely xenophobic and militaristic outlook, with aims to exterminate other species they encounter. Humans eventually become the second-most advanced and widespread civilization in the Milky Way galaxy, after the Xeelee. Unaware of the Photino–Xeelee war and the existential ramifications of what is at stake, humanity come to the (unwarranted) conclusion that the Xeelee are a sinister and destructive threat to their hegemony and security. Through a bitter war of attrition, humans end up containing the Xeelee to the galactic core. Both humans and the Xeelee gain strategic intelligence by using time travel as a war tactic, through the use of closed timelike curves, resulting in a stalemate for thousands of years. Eventually, humanity develops defensive, movable pocket universes to compartmentalize and process information, and an exotic weapon able to damage the ecological stability of the core's supermassive black hole. Minutes after the first successful strike, the Xeelee withdraw from the galaxy, effectively ceding the Milky Way to fully human control. Humanity continued to advance technologically for a hundred thousand years afterwards, then attacked the Xeelee across the Local Group of galaxies. However, despite having annoyed the Xeelee enough to give up activities in the Milky Way, humans, having become an extremely powerful Type III civilization themselves at this point, prove only to be a minor distraction to the Xeelee on the whole, being ultimately unable to meaningfully challenge their dominance across the universe.

Although the Xeelee are masters of space and time capable of influencing their own evolution, they are ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the Photino Birds. They instead utilize cosmic strings to build an enormous ring-like structure (which comes to be known as Bolder's Ring, or simply the Ring) to permit easy travel to other universes, allowing them and other species to escape the Photino Birds' destruction of the universe. The Xeelee, despite their unapproachable aloofness and transcendent superiority, appear to be compassionate and charitable toward the younger and less advanced species that inhabit the universe, demonstrating this by doing such things as constructing a specially made universe suited to the Silver Ghosts, who humans had nearly driven to extinction. Humans are likewise shown compassion by them and allowed to use the Ring to escape, despite their relentless long war against the Xeelee.

Not all printings included volume number.

Series of thematically-linked novels set within the main Xeelee Sequence. Published by Gollancz.

Short fiction set within the Xeelee Sequence. Below is an incomplete list.

Previously anthologized short fiction.

Limited editions distributed by UK-based PS Publishing. Mayflower II won the 2004 BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction.{{cite web |title=BSFA Awards – Previous Award Winners |url=http://www.bsfa.co.uk/bsfa-awards/ |url-status=live |archive-url=https://archive.today/20130419202407/http://www.bsfa.co.uk/bsfa-awards/ |archive-date=19 April 2013 |access-date=28 August 2016 |work=British Science Fiction Association}}

Short stories published as "A Tale of Old Earth". Stories are collected in Xelee: Endurance (2015)

The novels in chronological order (as opposed to publication order) are given below. Some of the novels contain elements occurring at different points in the timeline. The story anthologies (Vacuum Diagrams, Resplendent, and Xeelee: Endurance) each contain stories taking place across the entire chronology.

In 2009, Baxter posted a detailed chronology of the Xeelee Sequence explaining the proper chronological reading order of all the novels, novellas, and short stories up to that year. The timeline was updated in September 2015.{{cite web |title=The Xeelee Sequence – Timeline |url=http://www.stephen-baxter.com/articles.html#xeelee |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140705064948/http://www.stephen-baxter.com/articles.html#xeelee |archive-date=5 July 2014 |access-date=12 June 2014 |work=stephen-baxter.com}}

When asked directly for a suggested reading order, the author wrote: "I hope that all the books and indeed the stories can be read stand-alone. I'm not a great fan of books that end with cliff-hangers. So you could go in anywhere. One way would be to start with Vacuum Diagrams, a collection that sets out the overall story of the universe. Then Timelike Infinity and Ring which tell the story of Michael Poole, then Raft and Flux which are really incidents against the wider background, and finally Destiny's Children."{{cite web |title=Fiction Excerpts and Interviews |url=http://www.themanifold.co.uk/interview.php |url-status=bot: unknown |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061002234858/http://www.themanifold.co.uk/interview.php |archive-date=2 October 2006 |work=themanifold.co.uk}}

{{primary sources|section|date=January 2019|This appears to have been first published in the introduction to the Omnibus, and is thus not independent of the subject. This quote is long and promotional, and probably violates neutrality. It would be best to have critical reviews from multiple sources.}}

Science fiction author Paul J. McAuley has praised Baxter and the series, saying:

{{quotation|Baxter doesn't shrink from tackling the dismayingly inhuman implications of vast abysses of past or future time, but the universality of life introduces perspective, motion and plot into every part of his Stapledonian cosmological framework.

It is great, heady, mind-bending stuff, meticulously mapped onto cutting edge speculations about the birth pangs of the universe and the ultimate fate of all known time and space, constantly enlivened and driven forward by the narratives that its vast range of life generates.

[It represents an] accomplished and imaginative exploration, expansion and reworking of SF's core themes. His characters contest for living space with a panoply of bizarre aliens in a galaxy crammed with ancient wonders and secret histories; his stories reinvent the baroque excesses of space opera and brace them with imaginative exploration of ideas from stellar zoology, cosmology, quantum theory, exotic mathematics, and much else. Narratives froth with moments of shock and awe, and those sudden reversals of scale that induce the metaphysical dizziness sometimes called sense of wonder. Sentences stride confidently across centuries; paragraphs encompass millennia. Individual voices carry the story forwards, but the story is always bigger than the individuals that are caught up in it.{{cite book |last=McAuley |first=Paul |editor-last=Baxter |editor-first=Stephen |title=Xeelee: An Omnibus |publisher=Gollancz |date=January 2010 |pages=viii–ix |chapter=Introduction |isbn=978-0575090415}}}}

• Stephen Baxter (author)
• Hard science fiction
• Great Attractor
• Kardashev scale

{{Notelist}}

{{Reflist}}

• Stephen Baxter's [http://www.stephen-baxter.com/index.html official website].
• The complete (as of September 2015) [http://www.stephen-baxter.com/articles.html#xeelee timeline for the Xeelee Sequence] of novels and stories, hosted on Baxter's official website.
• {{isfdb series|259}}

{{Stephen Baxter|state=collapsed}}

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