Exultant

Motor writes "Stephen Baxter is a remarkably prolific British hard science-fiction author -- one of many that have come to prominence in Britain over the last ten years or so. Exultant is the second part of his Destiny's Children series (no Beyonce jokes, please). The first part, Coalescent, was also reviewed on Slashdot. Set in both 400 A.D. and modern times, Coalescent dealt with the possibility of humans lapsing into a eusocial society (a hive). How would such a thing get started? How would it function? And how would it hide itself from 'normal' human society? At the end of the novel, the action jumps forward twenty-thousand years to when humanity has spread out across the galaxy and is cleaning out worlds which have become coalescent. This is where Exultant begins... or rather, it seems to begin." Read on for the rest of Motor's review. Exultant author Stephen Baxter pages 490 publisher Gollancz rating 9 reviewer Motor ISBN 0345457889 summary The second book of the Destiny's Children novels

Exultant is not a direct sequel to Coalescent, in that it doesn't pick up the story of George Poole and continue it. The concept of coalescence plays little part in this new novel -- so anyone expecting more of the same may be disappointed, but not for long. Once you start reading Exultant, it quickly becomes clear that the Destiny's Children novels are part of the Xeelee sequence (something that was not obvious in the first novel). The Xeelee sequence is a future history, mapped out by Baxter, in which humanity spreads out from Earth; is crushed and enslaved; frees itself; and in a much harder and violent form begins to assimilate and destroy other alien cultures, all the while being unaware of the larger and more important cosmic battle being fought all around it.

At the opening of Exultant, humanity is close to the end of its third wave of assimilation. It has spread across the galaxy crushing everything in its way -- even the mysterious and powerful Xeelee have retreated into the core of the galaxy. The whole of human society is held together unchanged across millions of light-years and billions of worlds by the Druz doctrines -- ruthless rules intended to keep humanity conquering and to punish any deviations from the human norm. The result is a human society turned into a colossal war machine, dedicated to one aim: the destruction of its last enemy, the Xeelee. But the war machine has been stalled for thousands of years. The Xeelee have no intention of leaving the galactic core, and their advanced technology (nightfighters constructed out of flaws in space-time itself) and ability to manipulate time means that every human assault is repelled easily. Trillions of human lives are wasted by hurling themselves at Xeelee defenses ... and it goes on and on. A war machine with billions of worlds full of generations of soldiers barely in their teens born in tanks and dying in thousand-year-long projects aimed at smashing the Xeelee, and knowing nothing but training, the doctrines and death. Whether in a coalescent hive or a not, it seems most human lives are spent in an empty drone-like struggle governed by simple rules -- indeed this message pervades the novel. In Coalescent the rules governing the eusocial society were:

Sisters matter more than daughters.
Ignorance is strength.
Listen to your sisters.

In Exultant the rules are the Druz doctrines, with a key part being 'A brief life burns brightly.'

In the middle of this multi-millennial slaughter, a young pilot, Pirius, and his crew decide to disobey doctrine and instead of throwing their lives away in a pointless heroic gesture they try a bold strategy. As a result they capture a Xeelee nightfighter, which is the first significant development in the war for hundreds of generations. Naturally, the rigid doctrinal bureaucracy chooses to prosecute him rather than promote him -- but with a twist. Thanks to his faster than light travel, Pirius has arrived back a few years before he left. Time is a malleable thing in this war and meeting oneself isn't unusual.

He arrives back to find himself still in training, and both Piriuses must be punished: one for breaking doctrine and the other to make sure he doesn't in future. His saviour is a strange Earth commissioner (part of the powerful bureaucracy controlling the war effort) who is desperate for a way to unlock the stalemate with the Xeelee and bring to an end the waste of life. He needs someone willing to step outside the rules -- even if it is only a little at first. So begins the split story of Pirius Red and Pirius Blue. One sent to a punishment camp to train as Xeelee cannon fodder, and the other taken back to Earth to see a solar system radically changed by alien occupation, thousands of years of industrial activity and a society at the core of the war effort that is not as doctrinally pure as he'd been brought up to believe.

No-one will ever accuse Stephen Baxter of thinking small. His Xeelee sequence novels are set in a universe teeming with life since the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang -- and indeed before that -- and a war that has raged between dark matter life-forms and baryonic life such as the Xeelee (with humans as a self-destructive nuisance ignorant of the larger conflict), for most of that time.

Exultant is a story of individual human courage and brilliance, and collective human stupidity and self-destruction. Those who dislike Baxter's work (and there are some!) because it is pessimistic about humanity as a whole will find nothing to change their minds here. On the other hand, anyone looking for hard science-fiction of breathtaking scope and bursting with invention and ideas will love it. Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes with the next part. One advantage of following Baxter's work is that you rarely have long to wait between novels.

You can purchase Exultant from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Going back in Time

[sameerdesai]

From the review " Time is a malleable thing in this war and meeting oneself isn't unusual." Uhoh.. I am in a infinite loop.. mass cloning of myself.. here I come..

Skip chapter 14

[Anonymous Coward]

You see, Pirius is gay, and chapter 14 is when he meets himself and, well, I won't spoil it, but skip chapter 14.

The Time Ships

[GMontag451]

I've read Manifold Time and Manifold Space, and while interesting, they didn't really engage me. The two books of his that I've read and really enjoyed were The Time Ships, his authorized sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, and Vacuum Diagrams, a collection of short stories set in the Xeelee Sequence mentioned in the review.

Of hives and genetics

[G4from128k]

I'm somewhat skeptical of hives for humans because of the differences between human genetic structures and the genetic structures of true hive makers (Hymenopterans e.g., bees, ants, and wasps).

The hive construct arose in these insects because of a unique genetic quirk called haplodiploidy -- females are diploid (getting 2 copies of each chromosome, one from each parent) and males are haploid (getting a single copy of each chromosome from the mother only). This quirk makes females more related to their sisters than to their own daughters. If a bee, ant or wasp "wants" to be selfish, it foregoes having its own offspring and raises sisters. This creates the basis for a very strong social bond in which individuals maximize their own fitness by belonging to a group. Humans have no such genetic basis -- the bond for sociality is limited to a more transactional trade of social tit-for-tat.

I like Stephen Baxter and will have to read this series to see if/how he addresses this issue.

Re:Of hives and genetics

[stonecypher]

Well, just because the bees happen to have a genetic mechanism to encourage hive behavior doesn't mean there aren't others, or in fact that such a thing is even required. You're trying too hard to map human desires and needs onto other biologies. Ants are too dumb to want things; their behavior is driven largely by lack of certain behaviors being adequately performed from their perspectives (very similar to the scratch an itch mechanism underlying some larger OSS projects, natch.)

There are many non-haploiding hiving creatures, such as termites, the Japanese, and arguably some forms of gopher and wren - there's even a reasonable argument for the clownfish, which build up coral reefs and sacrifice one so that the rest of the school can escape, and the sequoia, which are entire forests as single entities and which intentionally kill edge trees to keep other plants from crossing soil borders.

IANAEvolutionaryBiologist, but I suspect the primary reason that we see hiving occuring in tiny animals isn't about a particular biological mechanism at all, but rather the food requirements of a hive of things much larger. Transportation isn't cheap, and one of a hive's large vulnerabilities is that the population due to design cannot spread out to increase food available to the individual as do individual predators. As such, the hive is limited to the food sources available within an individual's travel. For this reason, one rarely sees a hive even near a desert border, because the half of the food region which is worthless means that area cannot sustain the hive even if the other half of the region is good. If one deals with a hive of larger creatures, that food cost spirals up stratospherically, which eventually pits the individual's needs directly against those of its hive; it's all well and good to ignore one's daughters in favor of one's sisters, but to ignore one's self in a setting due to food constraints means a significant portion of the population would be starving, meaning that a successful hive would be damned hard to create.

As far as the bond for sociality, many biologists believe that altruism and samaritanism are deeply hard-wired into us, but at the tribal scale instead of the species scale, which is one good argument for the prevalence of racism and other forms of us-vs-them. Preserve the tribe at the expense of other tribes. Fits very well into the worldview wherein one thinks of creatures as vehicles for genes to spread.

So, maybe it's not as cut and dried as you suggest.

how would they live?

[lawpoop]

"How would it function?"

Probably just like any other eusocial society? With an egg laying queen, sterile female workers, and mouthless drones who live just long enough to mate? For a neat mammal example of this structure, see Nake mole rats.

Re:Sounds original...

[nine-times]

I liked that. Take a standard literary cliche, but add a 'twist'.

I thought "taking a standard literary cliche, but adding a 'twist'," was the most standard literary cliche.

So, it's bookilicious?

[saddino]

Exultant is the second part of his Destiny's Children series (no Beyonce jokes, please).

Oops.

Why are the fictions reviews scifi only????

[Ars-Fartsica]

Come on, we're all grown ups (well, some of us are)...doesn't anyone read anything outside of the scifi and fantasy realm???

Re:This sounds like a dystopia

[Tackhead]

> The review makes the book sound like an enormous dystopia: I have seen the future, and it is horrible.

Interesting. The story works for me, because first of all, my reaction to the notion of humanity ending up "spread across the galaxy crushing everything in its way", powerful enough to waste trillions of lives and survive, is indeed "Exultation".

> Dystopias succeed, when they do, by pointing out dangerous trends in the present, and showing what could happen if they're allowed to grow unchecked.

And simultaneously, "a human society turned into a colossal war machine, dedicated to one aim: the destruction of its last enemy" is precisely what we have now -- and it applies whether you've chosen the side of America 2.0 or Allah 0.9 -- either way you're adopting "ruthless rules intended to keep [your notion of what it means to be] humanity conquering and to punish any deviations from [your ideal of] the human norm)

> Even so, it's a good review, because it told me exactly why I personally wouldn't want to read this. If you're interested in this type of thing, I hope you enjoy it.

No argument there. A future history in which we actually win such an otherwise pointless grudge match of a war sounds pretty interesting, particularly if we have to do so by transcending ourselves. For me, the best SF stories are simultaneously about humanity while being about transcending humanity. In that sense, I agree it's a good review. But I'm also sufficiently "interested in that type of thing" that it doesn't even sound dystopic. YMMV :)

Strange coincedence?

[null etc.]

Let me share with you a strange event that just happened to me. It may be slightly offtopic, but is strongly reminiscent of this book review.

I was just about to post to /. in order to try to get another Score 5, Funny, when all of the sudden I received an email from myself.

Now, this is very dubious, since no one on my LAN would spoof an email to me. So I read it, and it said "Dear null etc., I know this sounds strange, but I am you, and must warn you (or me, for that matter) that you should not post to /. and get another Score 5, Funny. If you do (and I did, that's why I'm warning you), the consequences will be dire, and the overall quality of the posts on /. will decline."

So I quickly deleted my post and sent this one instead. Now, I'll wait patiently and hope I don't get Score 5, Funny.

Re:Sounds original...

[poopdeville]

Brain... melting...

Take a standard literary cliche, like taking a standard literary cliche and adding a twist, and add a twist. Clever. We've added two twists to a standard literary cliche. But we still end up with a standard literary cliche. By induction, standard literary cliches are closed under twists.

Re:Sounds original...

[Caraig]

But the trick is to just add a half-twist to it. Then you get a Mobius cliche, a story that has only one side to it. All character-driven conflict gets poured into a Klein bottle from which it is both inside and outside the story, and cops in the story start dunking mugs into coffee doughnuts.

Re:This only shows how poorly you have read...

[mbrother]

Then try reading some more, or keep your snobbery to yourself. Why not tell everyone what you think is so perfect and wonderful for those aged 16+? Then you can get some /. snobbery back (and I have no doubt equally passionate and honest snobbery) about how your particular choice isn't so great. I read inside and outside the genre, and while I would hope bright 15 year olds would enjoy my science fiction novels, I would also hope 16 year olds would.

There are ideas -- deep, important ideas -- to explore about what it means to be human that can't be done in mainstream literature. Now, science fiction can be bad, but so can any literary form. It can also be great. Again, you could try reading some more. Don't limit yourself to the "major" sf books/series which are more likely to reach for the lowest common denominator to reach a broader audience. Look especially at Nebula Award winners, which are chosen by other writers, not the fans (although Nebula politics can skew results).

Have you read Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner? How about Replay by Ken Grimwood? The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester?

At least you could keep quiet. It's pretty rude to wade into a conversation people are having only to proclaim that they're talking about something only kids should like.