The Xeelee Sequence - Timeline

A complete (as of July 2009) timeline for the ‘Xeelee Sequence’ of novels and stories.

Stephen Baxter

Singularity: Big Bang

ERA: Primordial

~13.7 by (billion years) ago:

Life born with universe.

~13.5 by ago:

First stars. First contact between Xeelee and photino birds. Xeelee timeships begin modification of Xeelee evolutionary history.

~10 by ago:

Construction of Bolder’s Ring begins. Birth of Sol.

~5 by ago:

Assaults on Ring by photino birds begin. Life on Earth emerges.

~1 by ago:

First infestation of Sol by photino birds.

~1 my (million years) ago:

Galaxy core explosion caused by Xeelee activity.

ERA: Earth

AD 476-2005:

Events of Coalescent. Emergence of first human ‘hive’ in Rome.

AD 2047:

Events of Transcendent (see also ~AD 500,000)

ERA: Expansion

AD 3000+:

Opening up of Sol system. First Expansion of humanity to the stars begins.

AD 3621:

Birth of Michael Poole.

AD 3672:

‘The Sun-People’ **.

AD 3685:

‘Return to Titan’ ***.

AD 3698:

‘The Logic Pool’ **.

AD 3717:

Launch of GUTship Cauchy. Events of Timelike Infinity begin.

AD 3825:

‘Gossamer’ **.

AD 3829:

Wormhole time-travel invasion by Occupation-Era Qax (Timelike Infinity)

AD 3948:

‘Cilia-of-Gold’ **.

AD 3951:

‘Lieserl’ **: Events of Ring begin (see also AD 5,000,000).

AD 3953:

Launch of GUTship Great Northern.

AD 4820:

‘Starfall’ ***: collapse of solar empire.

ERA: Squeem Occupation

AD 4874:

Conquest of human planets by Squeem.

AD 4874:

‘Pilot’ **.

AD 4922:

‘The Xeelee Flower’ **.

AD 4925:

Overthrow of Squeem. Second Expansion begins.

AD 5024:

‘More Than Time or Distance’ **.

AD 5066:

‘The Switch’ **.

AD 5071:

‘Remembrance’ ***.

ERA: Qax Occupation

AD 5088:

Conquest of human planets by Qax.

AD 5274:

Return to System of GUTship Cauchy. Launch of backward time-travel invasion by Qax. Establishment of Qax wormhole to future (~AD 5700) (Timelike Infinity).

AD 5301:

‘Cadre Siblings’ *.

AD 5406:

‘Blue Shift’ **.

AD 5407:

‘Conurbation 2473’ *. Overthrow of Qax. Humans acquire Spline and starbreaker technology.

ERA: Resurgence

AD 5408:

‘Reality Dust’ *. Third Expansion begins under Coalition government.

AD 5420:

‘Mayflower II’ *. Launch of generation starship Mayflower II. (See also AD 24974.)

AD 5478:

‘All in a Blaze’ *

ERA: The War with the Ghosts

AD 5499:

‘Silver Ghost’ *: first contact with the Silver Ghosts.

AD 5611:

‘The Quagma Datum’ **.

AD 5653:

‘Planck Zero’ **.

AD 5664:

‘Soliton Star’ **.

AD 5802:

‘The Cold Sink’ *. The Ghost wars break out.

AD 5810:

‘The Seer and the Silverman’ ***.

AD 6454:

‘On the Orion Line’ *.

AD 7004:

‘Ghost Wars’ *. End of effective resistance by the Ghosts.

AD 7524:

‘The Ghost Pit’ *.

ERA: Assimilation

AD 10,000+:

Humans dominant sub-Xeelee species. Rapid expansion and absorption of species and technologies. Launch of Xeelee timeships into deep past.

AD 10102:

‘Lakes of Light’ *

AD 10515:

‘The Gödel Sunflowers’ **.

AD 10537:

‘Breeding Ground’ *

AD 12478:

‘The Dreaming Mould’ *

AD 12659:

‘The Great Game’*. Initiation of hostilities with the Xeelee.

ERA: The War for the Galaxy

AD 20424:

‘The Chop Line’ *.

AD 21124:

‘Vacuum Diagrams’ **.

AD 22254:

‘In the Un-Black’*.

AD 23479:

‘Riding the Rock’ *.

AD 24973:

Events of Exultant. The human conquest of the centre of the Galaxy.

ERA: The Shadow of Empire

AD 24974:

‘Mayflower II’ *. Retrieval of generation starship Mayflower II.

c.AD 25,000+:

Collapse of central Coalition government. Conflict among successor states.

AD 27152:

‘Between Worlds’ *

c.AD 40,000+:

The Bifurcation of Mankind.

ERA: The War to End Wars

c.AD 90,000+:

Reunification.

c.AD 100,000+:

Human assaults on Xeelee concentrations across the supercluster.

AD 104,858+:

Events of Raft

AD 104,858:

‘Stowaway’ **.

AD 168,349:

Launch of the Exaltation of the Integrality.

AD 171,257:

‘The Tyranny of Heaven’ **.

AD 193,474:

‘Hero’ **.

c.AD 193,700:

Events of Flux

c.AD 200,000+

Establishment of Commonwealth by ‘undying’. Continued conflict with Xeelee.

c.AD 500,000:

Events of >Transcendent (see also AD 2047). The high-water mark of human destiny.

ERA: The Fall of Mankind

c.AD 500,000+:

The retreat of mankind begins. Fragmentation of human unity. The Long Calm.

c.AD 700,000+:

The Xeelee Scourge. Intervention of photino birds in stellar evolution becomes significant.

c.AD 1 my:

‘The Siege of Earth’ *. Final siege of Sol system by Xeelee. Defeat and imprisonment of mankind.

ERA: Flight

c.AD 1-4 my:

Xeelee and photino birds’ transformation of baryonic universe.

c.AD 4 my+:

Migration of Xeelee through Ring. Sol leaves Main Sequence.

c.AD 4 my:

‘Secret History’ **.

AD 4,101,214:

‘Shell’ **.

AD 4,101,266:

‘The Eighth Room’ **.

AD 4,101,284:

‘The Baryonic Lords’ **.

c.AD 4.9 my:

Final destruction of Ring by photino birds begins.

ERA: Photino Victory

c.AD 5.0 my+:

Last humans return to Sol in GUTship Great Northern, and travel to Ring: Events of Ring (see also AD 3953).

AD 10 my+:

Virtual extinction of baryonic life. Most of the last humans survive on a time-shifted Earth.

ERA: Old Earth

AD 3.8 by:

‘PeriAndry’s Quest’ ***.

AD 4 by:

‘Climbing the Blue’ ***.

AD 4.5 by:

‘The Time Pit’ ***.

AD 4.8 by:

‘The Lowland Expedition’ ***.

AD 5 by:

‘Formidable Caress’ *** . Collision of Milky Way Galaxy with Andromeda.

Singularity: Timelike Infinity

Sources:

Novels:

Raft (1991), Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993), Ring (1994), Coalescent (2003), Exultant (2004), Transcendent (2005).

Stories:

* Collected in Resplendent (2006).

** Collected in Vacuum Diagrams (1997)

*** Uncollected (as of July 2009) but unofficially added in Old Earth Stories:

‘PeriAndry’s Quest’ first published in Analog, June 2004.

‘Climbing the Blue’ first published in Analog, July/August 2005.

‘The Time Pit’ first published in Analog, October 2005.

‘The Lowland Expedition’ first published in Analog, April 2006.

‘Remembrance’ first published in The New Space Opera, ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, Voyager, 2007.

‘The Seer and the Silverman’ first published in Galactic Empires, ed. Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, SFBC, 2008.

‘Starfall’ first published by PS Publishing, April 2009.

‘Formidable Caress’, first published in Analog, November 2009.

‘Return to Titan’ first published in Godlike Machines ed. Jonathan Strahan, SFBC, to be published.

The origin of the Xeelee universe

First published in Wondrous Beginnings, ed Steven Silver, Tekno Books / Daw Books, Jan 2003.

The Xeelee Flower was first published in 1987.

By then I'd been writing stories for around 15 years, without success in placing anything for publication; I'd even tried out a novel. I'd tried to study the craft - notably, in those days, Larry Niven. I was a great fan of stories like The Hole Man, which was written in such a lucid style that studying it helped me figure out how such pieces work.

The core of Xeelee Flower was the central jeopardy situation: I had an image of an astronaut, stranded in orbit around a sun about to go nova, sheltering behind an energy-soaking 'umbrella'. To develop the idea I did some technical research, to figure out just how much each square metre of the umbrella would have to absorb.

But I also figured out the background: Who was this guy? How had he got stranded there? Where did the 'umbrella' come from? I came up with the notion of powerful off-stage aliens called the Xeelee (I can't remember where I got the name), whose purloined artefact, the Xeelee Flower itself, would save my hero's life. Accompanying this was the vague idea of a Galaxy full of minor species, including ourselves, living in the shadow of the Xeelee.

All this was very playful; I wanted the tone to be light and fast-paced, and writing was just a hobby for me in those days. I worked on the story in the early summer of 1986. I remember sitting up late to watch soccer matches in that year's World Cup; when the action was dull I would progress the story a little more.

I actually had the story completed before I found Interzone, its eventual market. I was lucky in a sense that the magazine had an upcoming new writers' issue, with a slot just big enough for Flower. But I'd been pushing on a lot of closed doors for a long time; one of them was eventually going to open for me.

The Xeelee, of course, continue to be very important for me. In my next story I posited humans in a four-dimensional cage, put there by more powerful off-stage aliens. Eventually I realised that if I made the aliens the Xeelee, I had the beginning and the end of a future history, which grew, organically, from that point. I suspect for much of my career I'll be referring back to elements of this story.

The origin of the Destiny's Children series

.

First published in the BSFA's Focus magazine, November 2005.

Resplendent was (in the noble tradition of Douglas Adams) the fourth book in my 'Destiny's Children' trilogy.

This series, published in the UK by Gollancz and in the US by Del Rey, is about the possibilities of human evolution. The first novel Coalescent (2003) is set in the present day, with the hero George Poole uncovering a human 'hive' in the catacombs of Rome. Exultant (2004) is set 25,000 years in the future, when humanity is locked in a galactic war. Transcendent (2005) follows up both the previous books, as George Poole's nephew Michael deals with climate-change disasters in the near future, amid an intervention from a far future beyond the Galaxy war. Resplendent (2006) is a 'fix-up' of short fiction (up to novella length) set against the background of this future history.

Where did this series come from, and how did it end up in its final form?

The answer is complicated; there were many inputs. But one starting point is Australia, which I visited in 1999 for the Melbourne worldcon. I was very struck by my first one-to-one with a 'roo in a nature park north of Melbourne. Close to they seemed extraordinary, with those remarkable levered back legs. To my (non-biologist's) eye kangaroos were examples of alternative bio-engineering, like aliens from the imagination of Niven, Vinge or Jack Cohen.

Of course kangaroos and the rest of the native fauna evolved differently from 'us' because of Australia's long isolation from the other continents. Such experiences gave me a wonderful sense of deep time, and of the reality of evolution. (One outcome of this inspiration was to be my novel Evolution (2002).)

Another input was a visit to Japan in 1997 for a convention there. I'm lucky enough to be sold in many countries, and without wishing to stereotype, I've found that different national markets respond to different types of book. The French, for instance, liked the alternate-history politics of Voyage (1996). The Japanese, though, seemed to like the super-science of my earlier 'Xeelee' sequence, from Raft (1991) to Ring (1994), and the fix-up collection Vacuum Diagrams (1997). I always wondered if the Japanese felt they were already living in the near future compared to Europe and America. My Xeelee sequence, which began with my very first published fiction, 'The Xeelee Flower' (Interzone 1987), had been fruitful for me, but by the time I'd completed Vacuum Diagrams I'd come to feel enclosed by the whole thing, tied down by my own continuity. But the kindly enthusiasm of the Japanese fans made me think again.

In the Xeelee chronology humanity expands out from Earth into a universe chock-ful of alien life and cultures, in the manner of Niven's 'Known Space', perhaps. The story simplifies as we become dominant, save for one foe: the aloof and supremely powerful Xeelee. At last we fall back, and after a million years we are defeated, our last survivors imprisoned in a bubble universe.

The earlier material had told the story of the beginning and the end of this saga. But now I began to think about the 'middle bit'. How could mere humans actually fight an interstellar war? For one thing, every FTL starship is also a time machine, an awkward consequence of special relativity. I don't believe this has been handled adequately before. I drew on my evolutionary speculations too. Even with FTL technology, war fronts spanning thousands of light years would surely translate into engagements lasting thousands of years. The human species is only a hundred thousand years old; if it lasted long enough, surely the war itself would become an evolutionary pressure. Perhaps in such a war the ultimate form of humanity would be the child soldier.

So I started to try to figure out in more detail how humanity's rise and fall could come about, and how humanity might be shaped in response. After a couple of months I began to carve out specific ideas for short stories, the first being 'Cadre Siblings' (Interzone, 2000), the start of the sequence of stories that would result finally in Resplendent. For me nothing crystallises ideas so well as actually writing something down, and the short fiction let me feel my way into a complicated universe.

Meanwhile, however, I was gathering other ideas. I try to keep my mind open to a range of inputs, for you never know where an idea is going to come from or where it might lead you. In this case I attended a rather heavyweight conference on human evolution in London, at which one speculative paper described the Catholic Church as a hive(!). Well, one manifestation of a hive, as daughters give up their own chance of reproducing to sustain their mothers' babies, is skewed reproductive strategies, and there are certainly plenty of those in the Church … The notion struck me particularly as I was born a Liverpool Catholic, and though I'm now lapsed I remain fascinated by the Church and its implications.

Of course hive minds have been done before, from HG Wells's Selenites in The First Men in the Moon (1901) to the Borg of Star Trek. But I quickly learned that the sociobiologists' explanations of hives in nature have moved on a lot over the last few decades. And I read up on modern ideas of 'emergence', in which, like ants in their colonies, we humans too are all embedded in mass, mindless systems, from traffic jams to the economy, which arise out of our individual decisions and actions, but are out of control of any of us. These developments hadn't been covered (as far as I knew) in sf to that point, and I felt it was time to visit the hives once more. I began to consider a book describing the survival of an early-Christian hive from Roman times to the present day. This would have more of the feel of a horror novel, I thought, compared to the space-operatic glitter of my Xeelee war idea.

And then (with apologies for the name-dropping) out of the blue I was contacted by Sir Arthur C Clarke, with whom, in parallel to all this, I was developing ideas for our 'Time Odyssey' collaborative series. On 27 January 2001 Clarke sent me a portion of a letter from Olaf Stapledon to JBS Haldane (!), dated 1945:

'Your utopia is a very exciting one. Why, though, must the intelligent animals forget the brutality of the past? I want everything to be fully remembered, everything to be fully cognized … For me the final utopia is not simply the thing for which past misery is a necessary means, that when it is reached the past may be forgotten. The final utopia must somehow redeem the past [my emphasis], or else be something less than utopia. How it can do so I naturally don't know, but at least it must be aware of the past, so that the past can at least be redeemed in the utopia's awareness, as a valued part within the past-present-future (or eternal) whole.'

Clarke wrote, 'Dear Stephen - This phrase [emphasised] haunts me - does it give you any ideas?' It certainly did, as redemption was another echo of my Catholic past. (In fact Stapleton himself dramatised this idea to some extent in his Last and First Men.)

This was another piece that fit into my slowly developing thinking about my still-nebulous project. What could be the motivation of an arbitrarily advanced culture of highly evolved humans? If you have it all and can do anything, what could you possibly want? It seemed to me that Stapledon's notion of a striving for redemption gave me a starting point.

But is redemption achievable, no matter how advanced your technology? It would surely be morally vacuous for an advanced civilisation to 'wipe out' the past. Likewise producing copies of individuals who live 'perfect' versions of their lives (as in physicist Frank Tipler's Big Crunch heaven) is surely meaningless because the suffering of the originals is still 'out there' somewhere. In Christianity Christ 'is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world' (1 John 2). But there has been a two-thousand-year debate about what exactly Christ's atonement meant, indeed what was the meaning of His death. (This old controversy was revived recently in the reaction to Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ.)

In the middle of 2001 I began to pull all this together into a proposal for a series of books to be called 'Homo Superior'. The three books would be three possible outcomes of the human evolutionary future, but not set in a single universe. The first, now called Coalescent, set in the present and past, was about hive minds surviving from ancient Rome: our future as drones. The second, Exultant, was the Galaxy war set in my Xeelee universe: our future as child soldiers. And the third, Transcendent, was about a highly evolved but flawed mass mind of the far future trying to achieve redemption by meddling with the past - that is, our present. Why a series? The ideas behind these novels, while different from each other, were all expressions of a common root, an interest in the possibilities of evolution. I suspect series of novels are popular in sf precisely because they give you a framework wide enough to look at big ideas from many angles, and there can be few bigger ideas than human evolution.

I worked on this proposal during a signing tour of the UK for that year's published novel, Manifold: Origin, and in the middle of drafting the next year's novel, Evolution. This is the way it goes; as it generally takes a year from submission of a manuscript to publication, you always find yourself working on many projects at once, and ideas and themes from one project inevitably, it seems to me, overlap into the next.

Amid the mucking-about with contracts, publishers and agents that followed (I'm always happy to achieve a sale, of course) it emerged that the American marketeers didn't like 'Homo Superior' as a title, for they imagined mid-westerners would think it had something to do with homosexuality. (I'm not making this up.) We bounced around alternatives and 'Destiny's Children' was their choice, even though I felt it was a bit lame, and was worried I might get sued by Beyonce Knowles.

So I began working on the first of the novels, Coalescent, in 2002. There's no cut-off point at which inputs and new ideas stop flowing, and as I started to drill into this novel the deeper thinking and new research reshaped my ideas. I've always had a certain fascination with Rome and Roman Britain. Perhaps this was a naïve romanticism about the fall of a great civilisation in the past: the story of Rome is more complicated, of course. But the mythos of the fall is part of its legacy. So I began to work that in as an element in the drama. As I researched further I visited locations: there's no substitute for actually seeing a place if you can. So we visited Rome, and locations in Britain as well, such as Verulamium (St Alban's) and the London Wall, a fascinating walk.

My main rescoping, though, was a decision to set all three of my novels in a single timeline, that of the Xeelee universe, so that now Books 1 and 3 would be respectively a prequel and sequel to Book 2, Exultant. For one thing I wanted to contrast this new series with my Manifold books which had used a similar parallel-universe strategy. And I had decided a single timeline would give greater resonance: while George Poole investigates the fall of Rome, a cataclysm in the past, he finds hints of greater cataclysms in the far future, to be developed in Books 2 and 3.

With the second book, Exultant, I was more explicitly revisiting my Xeelee universe. Human memory seems to have a series of cut-offs, which I've discovered as my career has (thankfully) lengthened. I may forget odd details of a book from a couple of years ago, but it's still 'mine'. A book from more than six or seven years ago, however, while of course I'll remember working on it, doesn't even feel like mine any more. So my earlier Xeelee material had the feel of an external input - as if, oddly, I was collaborating with a younger version of myself. But this helped the project, as incidents from the ancient history of the chronology became transmuted into myth, or the substance of religions. Michael Poole, a heroic but somewhat deranged engineer who features in the early material, is a descendant of the George and Michael Poole of 'Destiny's Children'. Also I suspect some of my earlier stuff, produced as I was learning the craft, has a deep connection to my subconscious concerns, never a bad well to draw from.

More inputs came from thinking about the Second World War, which shaped the 1950s Britain in which I was born. I visited Bletchley Park. In the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall I was struck by a wall map of the world studded all over by pin marks. That map showed that with 1940s technology they really had managed a war on a global scale; if that was possible maybe we could also rise to the 'challenge' of a galactic conflict. I have always responded to stories of heroism, and technological ingenuity under pressure. But personally I'm anti-war, I don't believe it's any way for an advanced civilisation to resolve its problems, and I'm greatly suspicious of our leaders' habit of using fear to control us. There are echoes of the Dambusters in Exultant, but Orwell is in there too. One speech I gave a military leader in a story in Resplendent came straight from Donald Rumsfeld.

When I came to Transcendent in 2004 I thought harder about the near future which was to be the arena for the far-future meddling. This section of the novel needed its own narrative, and I decided to tackle climate change, surely our greatest near-future threat, to be contrasted with galactic calamities in the further future. I'm depressed how much of the debate about climate change seems to veer from simple denial to a helpless listing of doomy possibilities. I wanted to be upbeat, to plot a way from now to an imagined 2047 in which we have managed a huge transition to a post-oil, low-carbon age.

These ideas were partly shaped by where I was living by now. We had moved from leafy but overcrowded Bucks to a rented house in a village called Ulgham in Northumberland, my wife's home county, where we were house-hunting for a permanent move. Ulgham is a classic relic of our petrol-obsessed economy. Once it was a self-contained agricultural community. Now there are no facilities but a pub, and everybody travels to church, school, shops. I saw that to survive the end of oil we are going to have to abandon the false economies of this endless travelling and live more locally: a revival of a village culture. But I'm not fantasising a return to the Neolithic; with modern communications we can bring work and school to us, rather than the other way around. My 2047 vision is still utopian, however, because it is predicated on wise leadership from the US...

Another ongoing input, incidentally, has always been ideas from the trunk: stories that didn't quite make it, but which nevertheless had elements worth revisiting. For example my novella 'Mayflower II', which won a BSFA award, drew on a never-published end-of-the-world story called 'Custodian' I drafted when I was nineteen, while another early story about undying babies called 'Planet of Immortals' was an input to my novella 'Reality Dust', and an end-of-the-sun story called 'Twilight' fed the closing novella of Resplendent. A story called 'The Ghost Pit' drew on a joky old piece called 'Save Me, Captain Culpepper!' published in the small press, and another piece called 'The Cold Sink' drew on ideas from a dodgy story called 'The Glittering Caverns' published only in Germany. A failed pitch for a TV drama called 'Virtuals', from 1997, was another input into Resplendent. And so on. One tip I'd certainly give budding writers is never to throw anything away; these ideas and characters are yours to reexplore.

Maybe the deepest input of all into this particular series was my childhood Catholicism. Authors are often asked what their influences are, the expected answers being a writer, a book, a movie, a TV show. But much more significant for each of us surely includes the type of landscape into which we're born, the point in history, the ethnic identity, the culture. And for me that culture was Catholicism. But if religion has shaped my sf, perhaps I'm not alone.

Adam Roberts' remarkable survey The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2005) takes as its framing narrative the idea that science fiction arose (or rather was revived from 'fantastic voyage' traditions dating back to antiquity) during the Reformation, when Protestantism ripped itself alien-like out of the chest of a horrified Catholicism, and that since then the genre has been shaped by a dialectic between rational and 'miraculous' poles.

This makes sense to me. Stapledon's Star Maker is about a quest for a supercosmic god outside the universe; works of Clarke's like Childhood's End and 2001 are about transcendence, godhood arising from within us. Even in comic-book mythologies you find Jesus-figures all over the place, not least Superman, the ur-hero himself. In an early episode of Smallville Clark Kent was 'crucified' in a repulsive high-school-hazing stunt; the writers of that smart show demonstrated they understood the deeper roots of their character. Even Doctor Who, in the final Tom Baker story 'Logopolis', 'died' in the process of defeating the Master, only to be resurrected (as Peter Davison).

Perhaps this religious dialectic lies at the centre of the genre's meaning because, long before sf, religions taught us to frame questions about the universe. For example the Fermi Paradox has much in parallel with the much more ancient conundrum of silentum dei, the 'Silence of God'. Bertrand Russell was once asked how he would respond to God if he were called to account for his atheism: Russell said he would ask God why He should have made the evidence for His own existence so poor. Perhaps the universe imagined by SETI enthusiasts, dominated by superior but invisible consciousnesses, really isn't so different from the Christian universe. The premises of all our religions may be wrong. But thinking about God will have served a profound purpose if it has been a kind of vast practice run, a training programme that has lasted millennia, to prepare us to deal with the real gods out there.

I think there's surely much truth in Adam's reading, though perhaps not the whole truth; nothing as complicated as sf can be boiled down to a single storyline. It certainly works for me. The whole of the Xeelee sequence is about a war in heaven, with we humans caught in the middle. And arguably you could see the three 'Destiny's Children' novels as different searches for a vanished God.

While I was still working on the project, of course, the first books and stories began to appear. I was reassured that my struggle through this thicket of ideas had resulted in material that received good reviews and won a few awards, along with a few brickbats. Sometimes success is unexpected, however. I hadn't really anticipated the positive response to Coalescent, my first near-contemporary novel, and the most autobiographical, I suppose. I was pleased, but I realised now that the follow-up, the space-operatic Exultant, was going to be a jolt for the readers. But by then it was too late to change horses.

Though I'm working on a new series of stories (called 'Old Earth' and published by Analog) set in a still further Xeelee future, my Destiny's Children project is complete, and I'm working on new stuff. The process of developing ideas - my process anyhow at this stage of my career - seems messy and fractal. I'll focus on the needs of a single story or novel chapter which might take a day or two to draft, but which is set in the overlapping contexts of a novel, and of a series which spans several years' work, and indeed of my whole career, dating back to 'The Xeelee Flower' - and even before, as elements of my background such as my childhood Catholicism find expression. Messy and fractal, but endlessly fascinating, and fun.

The Origin and Science of Old Earth

First published in Analog's Website, March 2006.

My “Old Earth” stories are the product of many impulses. But the very first was a trip to Australia for the Worldcon of 1999. After the con, my wife and I toured the island continent. Many overseas attendees took the same opportunity, and we encountered such exotic fauna as the Bushy-bearded Editor of Analog (Stanleius Schmidtus).

And I enjoyed my first one-to-one with a kangaroo, in a nature park north of Melbourne. Close to the kangaroos seemed extraordinary, with those remarkable levered back legs. To my (non-biologist’s) eye, they were like examples of alternative bio-engineering, aliens from the imagination of Niven or Vinge. Of course kangaroos and the rest of the native fauna evolved differently because of Australia’s long isolation from the other continents.

From that experience bubbled up the idea of a world with “stratified time.” I wanted to concoct a world in which the passage of time and its effects were manifest and intrusive, just as it was for me in that brief kangaroo moment. So how would it be if time ran at different rates in different places—in fact, at different altitudes? If time ran faster the higher up you climbed, you could perhaps reside on top of Australia’s Uluru and live out a life of decades, while mere hours passed down on the plain.

I could quickly think of many tales to be spun out of such a premise, some of which have emerged in the subsequent stories. “PeriAndry’s Quest” is a story of social impact; the longer-lived upper crust living at the bottom of the cliff exploit the (relatively) short-lived caste further up. In “The Time Pit” the strata of time are exploited in warfare. And in “Climbing the Blue” my hero deliberately accelerates his own life to save his wife; he grows old seeking a cure for her disease, while she stays young.

The vision came before the science, but how might such a time-pit world come about? Of course in relativity theory a black hole is something like my time pit; if you fell towards the event horizon, as seen by an outside observer, your elapsed time would seem to slow to vanishing. Every gravity well, including Earth’s, has similar properties, though on Earth the stratification is negligible to the senses. I wanted to see such effects built into a human-scale world, where climbing a staircase is enough to deliver a noticeable difference in time flow—but without such inconveniences as a black hole’s ferocious tidal forces.

Old Earth is an artefact. I imagined a far-future civilisation able to shape space and time to arbitrary ends in a way unimaginable to us, just as our Neolithic-farmer ancestors could surely not have imagined our modern mastery of materials technology and biotech, say. In the back of my mind, I think, was Greg Bear’s work, which has featured such artefacts of spacetime as the “Way” of Eon and its sequels. Is a time pit possible, however? Not within relativity theory, but relativity appears to be just one asymptote of a much deeper theory we’ve yet to assemble: quantum gravity. The possibilities opened up by quantum gravity ideas seem to me so wide that right now what is physically possible to an arbitrarily advanced technology is only loosely constrained. In other words, all bets are off!

Later another input came when I began work on my Destiny’s Children series of novels. These are a return to my “Xeelee Sequence” universe, which has roots that now go back nearly twenty years, God help me. While Destiny’s Children is about an episode at the centre of the Sequence’s grand narrative, I also began to think about the very far future of my universe. Having the pre-existing framework of the “Sequence” in place seems to enable me to think more deeply about the construction of such a future, and what trends might shape it.

For example, in Destiny’s Children humans are busily building a galactic empire. But what happens after the wave of colonisation has come and gone? On Earth, even if mankind were to disappear tomorrow, a future alien archaeologist would be able to deduce the existence of intelligence from the great mixing-up of the world’s flora and fauna we’ve caused since the age of exploration—such as the transporting of science fiction fans to the heart of Australia. So it will be after the starships have gone; Earth will be left with an “ecology” composed of fragments transported purposefully or accidentally across interstellar distances.

And it would be a true ecology, given enough time, a mosaic, not just a heap of fragments. If you have a different biochemistry to mine I may not be able to eat you. But I could perhaps use your skeleton as a supporting frame, or live off some by-product of yours, such as carbon dioxide or methane. In our present world there are productive symbioses of creatures such as birds and elephants, and bacteria and humans, far removed from each other on the evolutionary tree. Why not symbioses between colonists from different stars?

And then there’s technology. Already our tools enjoy an evolution of their own that has run parallel to ours since we’ve been toolmakers—that is, since hominids have walked the Earth. Right now this evolution is still shaped by our desires, but in the future, when machines become too complicated for us to build, and perhaps even smarter than us, this may no longer be true. And what then? In a far enough future you may find technological “species” with almost as deep an evolutionary pedigree as our own. And the machines will surely engage in symbiotic and other relationships with the other inhabitants of their world which may have nothing to do with the intent of the long-dead designers of their remote ancestors. Thus the wild weapons of “The Time Pit” and the predatory mobile buildings of “The Lowland Expedition.”

And so the ecology of future Earth could be a complex mixture of “native” (pre-technological) life, life forms with origins on other worlds, and much-evolved technological relics—and all locked into an ecology every bit as interconnected and interdependent the “entangled ban” of which Darwin eloquently wrote in The Origin of Species.

So the threads for my “Old Earth” stories came together. We are in the far future of the Xeelee Sequence universe. In a dangerous age, engineers built a shell of stratified spacetime over an exhausted Earth. Its inhabitants live slow enough that the feeble trickle of remnant interior heat sustains them. On the surface is a post-interstellar, post-technological ecology. Swimming slowly in their pond of slow time, the engineers’ descendants have been projected into the safety of the remote future. I have been feeling my way into this world with short fiction, rather as I did in the early days of my Xeelee project, my Manifold work and others, because I’ve found it’s a good way to develop such complicated ideas.

It’s fun to allow the characters in the stories to deduce the past history of their world from traces in their present, just as real-world geologists and biologists have decoded our own deep history from rocks and fossils. But everything about Old Earth has been, if not made by intelligence, then modified. Just as in our time, Old Earth philosophers argue against “intelligent design” and hold to the belief that everything is the product of the working-out of natural law. But on Old Earth, as in any far future shaped by intelligence we can imagine, the Creationists are right!

Table of Contents

The Xeelee Sequence - Timeline

The origin of the Xeelee universe

The origin of the Destiny's Children series

The Origin and Science of Old Earth