He is sent to boot camp for army grunts while his past self is whisked away by a bumbling absent-minded professor type who has the radical idea that the war should be won and has an idea how to do it. He and his self from two years ago are put on trial for disobeying orders. Pirius captures a Xeelee spacecraft (something nobody has apparently done before), but he uses his FTL drive and finds himself two years in the past (for science reasons).
Our main character, Pirius, is a pilot in the war with the alien Xeelee, a war that has consumed humanity and slowed its progress for 20,000 years. This is a bit of an overstatement: there are connections (the descendants of the "coalescents" or hive-like humans show up once or twice), but this is really another installment in Baxter's sprawling Xeelee sequence. Especially if you're looking for far-future space opera, you could skip Coalescent and dive right into Exultant. Exultant takes place in the same universe over 20,000 years later, so I guess it's a sequel in roughly the same way that Dune is a sequel to Hamlet. This is nominally a sequel to Baxter's Coalescent, which I read several years ago and enjoyed. What have we got here? Enough Big Ideas for several novels? Mind-bending physics? Characters that are just kinda there? The feeling that you just experienced something really cool that you can't completely explain? Must be a Stephen Baxter novel.
0 kommentar(er)
