It's like a universe of neurodivergents, right? No normal human talks like his characters do.
Who's read these books? I want to talk this shit out because they make me mad. I read Vacuum Diagrams when I was in Jr High, and have been working my way through his shit recently. Though Vacuum Diagrams was depressing, but holy shit, it's all pessimistic.
Why the frick is he obsessed with eusocial humans? If anything, neurodivergents are the oposite of eusocial.
There's a lot of contradictory shit, too. At some point the Silver Ghosts changed from kinda inconsiderate peepees to selfless martyrs. In Vacuum Diagrams there was a machine in Saturn that resonated micro black holes to make a cheap starbreaker, but in Exultant, humans just straight up have starbreakers. And in The Siege of Earth, Saturn conceals the Snowflake that can manipulate Mach's principle and deliver instantaneous gravitational attacks far beyond what was described in Vacuum Diagrams. For that matter, why was mankind in a Xeelee Hypercube? In the Siege of Earth, Luru Parz (btw the worst fricking character) puts Earth in a basket of time or something like that, but not a hypercube. So what timeline did the 8th Room happen in?
Transcendent is kinda interesting as an idea, but also ends up being morally repugnant due to the Undying being fricking ghouls. Baxter seems to have this idea that living longer makes you more of a frickhead and less human, when I would say the oposite happens. The premise that the Transcendence either has to kill all humans or "redeem" them also makes no sense. Seems like a cop out so the mankind can fail. He also went in big with the Clathrate Gun hysteria in the 22st century part which isn't a real thing. He seems to have a habit of extrapolating one questionable study into a whole novel.
All in all, still entertaining. Just wish he could write something positive with actual human characters.
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Xeelee is obviously for hard-science contrarian neurodivergents who think they're above Warhammer 40k.
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40k is cool in that there's still has a glimmer of hope for humanity and people have souls and it just cops to using space magic. Xeeleeverse is like "we're doomed to de-evolve or be trapped as quantum ghosts in the heat death of the universe"
I miss golden age of Sci-Fi novels that are like "there's challenging times up ahead, but everything turns out okay in the end". The Dune books turn out okay-ish, even if you leave out Brian Herbert's abortions. Even Halo has a "humanity came from greatness and will return to greatness" thing going on.
At some point Sci-Fi turned into some future /r/collapse
type shit.
Also, this is most unrealistic thing in his fricking books, neutron star kamikaze attacks don't hold a candle to this:
Oh and it always bothered me that he had his characters say "Lethe" instead of swearing.
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Sci-Fi became future collapse after 2008 when all the scifi writers lost any semblance of writing cottage in the countryside retirement.
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He has some really dumbshit political opinions that leak through from time to time, mostly related to the American Christian right that feel incredibly dated now so are doubly painful in retrospect.
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Wow, there are a lot of these now. I read Vacuum Diagrams, I think Ring, and maybe one more + some random stories. It seemed to me like the kind of setting to be contradictory because they were always fricking around with tachyons and new universes type shit.
Seemed sad to me that humanity never stopped fighting the Xeelee. Like they don't wanna frick with you, they just wanna do their inscrutable projects, also every time you frick with them they absolutely wreck you. Give it up after awhile
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It's interesting because my recollection was that the xeelee eventually took to treating humanity like a particularly unruly pet. Like they had no malice and eventually locked us in a box for our own good, while the humans the while time are entirely devoted to trying to kill the xeelee (and literally any other sentient species they can get their hands on). It's the single minded devotion of a dog chasing a car, so the pet analogy seems to fit.
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Whoa haven't thought about these in years. I had read a smattering in high school but it was a random collection of whatever my local library had. Ring and vacuum diagrams were the ones I really remember. His manifold series was also very enjoyable, and likely held up better since it doesn't look like he wrote a million of those.
It's pessimistic, but humanity developing a species level imperative of being the absolutely biggest peepees imaginable was very interesting to me at the time. Its a kind of human exceptionalism thats common to sci fi but with the twist being we're exceptional at genocide. That kind of subversion is kind of played out now though.
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