Transcendent is a science
fiction novel in Stephen Baxter's expansive “Xeelee Sequence”
(Raft, Ring, Timelike Infinity, Vacuum Diagrams, etc.) and the third
book in the “Destiny's Children” subseries, following Exultant
and Coalescent.
Like most of those books it has a more-or-less standalone story, but
you'll get a lot more out of it if you're familiar with its universe;
I'd recommend at least reading Exultant and Coalescent
first, and the short story collection Vacuum Diagrams wouldn't
hurt. (I recommend Vacuum Diagrams as the
best entrance point for new readers to the Xeelee Sequence a whole,
actually.)
Earth in the 2040s is a world
drastically diminished. Global warming has raised sea levels
drastically shifted climates around the world, devastating the
biosphere and displacing entire nations. The cost of fossil fuels and
desperate efforts to contain further environmental damage has made
the average person dramatically less mobile, with automobiles a
memory, air travel a luxury of the ultra-privileged.
Michael Poole is a middle-aged engineer
who has never recovered from the death of his wife Morag over a
decade ago. He's plagued by ghostly visions of his dead wife- except
that these visions began not only before she died, but long before
Michael had even met her. His life is thrown into turmoil when his
son Tom is nearly killed by the sudden eruption of methane gas from
the thawing ground of Siberia. Michael comes to a disturbing
realization- the colder regions of the world are filled with such
deposits, frozen into ground that is now unfreezing, and the release
of enough in a sufficiently short period of time could further
increase the greenhouse effect, releasing more gas and driving the
temperature still higher in a vicious cycle that could render the
world uninhabitable.
Michael sets out trying to find a way
to prevent this catastrophe, struggling with his grief over his dead
wife, his strained relationship with his son, and the challenge off
mustering support for a geoengineering project of massive scale in a
world that has grown increasingly decayed and fatalistic. And,
meanwhile, the ghostly image of his dead wife is appearing more
frequently.
500,000 years in the future, the human
race is united across the galaxy in a vast Commonwealth ruled by a
collective consciousness of immortal post-humans called the
Transcendence. Their technology is so advanced that they can peer
into the distant, and each of the Commonwealth's countless trillions
of inhabitants is required to Witness the life of a single human who
lived and died long ago. Michael Poole's Witness is a girl named Alia
who is unexpectedly pulled from the life she knows when she is chosen
for the rare honor of becoming a transcendent herself. An agent of
the transcendence takes her on a journey across the galaxy, teaching
her the lessons each of its members must learn.
Along the way, she starts to learn more
about the origins and nature of the Transcendence, and about its goal
of “redeeming” the suffering-filled history of the human race
before its continuing evolution puts it beyond humanity forever- but
doubt starts to set in as Alia starts learning what this “redemption”
will entail. The Transcendence, on the cusp of godhood, can do more
than just look into the past...
I greatly enjoyed Transcendence.
It's filled with the imagination and awe-inspiring sense of scale
commonly seen in Baxter's work and the Xeelee Sequence in particular.
The speculative elements are interesting, and the dual setting lets
Baxter incorporate an unusually diverse set of ideas, from the social
and economic effects of life without automobiles to human evolution
after hundreds of thousands of years and alien environments and the
cosmological theories that form the basis for the Transcendence's
ability to see into the past.
The two plot threads alternate
chapters, and Baxter does a good job of balancing them and keeping
both interesting. I repeatedly had the experience of wishing a
chapter would go on longer because I didn't want to leave that plot
behind yet, only to get drawn into the other thread in the next
chapter strongly enough that by the end of it I didn't want to return
to the thread I had just regretted leaving. That's always a good
sign.
Both the near-future and far-future
settings for the story are interesting. Technology in Michael Poole's
era has continued to advance, with developments including
sophisticated virtual reality interfaces and holographic projections,
a new source of power based on Higgs fields, and true artificial
intelligence that has become so ubiquitous that people who specialize
in working with computers have more in common with psychologists than
programmers.
But much has been lost. The automobile
has been abandoned and air travel is too expensive for anyone but the
most privileged, making the accessible world much smaller for the
average citizens of industrialized countries. The disruption of the
ecosystem brought by rapid global warming has led to mass extinctions
on a scale never seen in human history, while declining birth rates
in many countries have turned formerly bustling cities into
near-ghost towns. The world of the 2040's has an eerily quiet, empty
atmosphere- not unlike outer space in a lot of hard science fiction,
actually- that Baxter uses to good effect.
Meanwhile, Alia's thread fills in an
era that has been largely blank in the Xeelee Sequence until now. The
tens of thousands of years of bloody turmoil that raged as humanity
waged war for domination of the entire galaxy are over, and the
nightmarish totalitarian government called the Coalition that drove
those conflicts is long gone. (See Exultant and the short
story collection Resplendent for
more on this era.) Hundreds of thousands of years of both natural
evolution and genetic engineering in a vast diversity of environments
has given rise to myriad sub species of humans and post-humans, at
peace under the rule of the Transcendence.
We see a number of different
environments- Earth, still bearing the scars of an alien occupation
nearly half a million years in the past, an ancient generational
starship converted into a mobile space-going city, and planets with
environments that have radically reshaped humanity.
My favorite
element is the Transcendence itself, a group intellect of godlike
power and intelligence that is nevertheless as burdened by its
evolutionary history as a human being, even if that inheritance is
intellectual and psychological rather than genetic. The result is
something not only interesting but quite poignant, which is not
usually a word I use to describe far-future post-human
superintelligences, but it really works well here.
I definitely recommend Transcendent
to anyone who's a fan of Stephen Baxter and the Xeelee Sequence. I
also recommended it to fans of far-future science fiction in general,
though as said above it's not the Baxter book to start with.
