Mind Probe

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The Destiny’s Children series by Stephen Baxter consists of four books, “Coalescent“, “Exultant“, “Transcendent” and “Resplendent“. I have read the first three. The fourth book may not be directly available in the United States; as far as I can tell, it is only published by a UK publisher. Used copies of the fourth book are available from Amazon.com. If anyone know if Resplendent has been published in the United States or why it has not, I would love to hear about it.

The first three books are loosely related to each other. They take place in the same Universe, there are cross over with some characters, references to events in one book in the others. Each book is a complete story unlike some series today which are actually a single novel published in six parts. Since I have not read the fourth book in the series, my comments will be limited to just the first three books.

The first and third books contain two main threads that take place at different times and end up converging on each other. In Coalescent, one thread takes place around the fifth century when the Roman Empire withdrew from the British Isles and the second thread takes place in our near future. In Transcendent, the two time lines are about 40 years after the near future events of the first book and 500 million years in the future. The main character of the third book, who is in his 50’s in the third book and in his early teens in the first book, is the nephew of the main character of the first book and there are scenes with the nephew and uncle together in both books. The second book, Exultant takes place about 20 thousand years in our future when humankind is at war with a superior race called the Xeelee. The concept of the first book, what is a coalescent, is one of the themes that ties the first three books together.

All in all, it is a series that challenges the reader with ideas more than action though there are action sequences, especially during the war with the Xeelee. The books explore concepts of human societies with variations, family relations and how a galactic culture can function by placing you in the middle of the stories, allowing you to observe these concepts in action. I recommend this series to those who want to expand their mind around interesting concepts and if you are a Stephen Baxter fan, they are a must read.

There are technologies and alien races in this series that Stephen Baxter has used in other works. The Xeelee come to mind plus the Ghosts are races encountered in other books. Spline ships are just one of the technologies that appear through Baxter’s stories. One book does stick out as being a forerunner to this series; Vacuum Diagrams. This book collects the Xeelee short stories and turns them into a novel. This book also has the character Michael Poole who is the main character in Transcendent. The history of the Universe is different between Vacuum Diagrams and the Destiny’s Children series. For one thing, Michael Poole lived in the 21 century in the series and was born 3621 A.D. in Vacuum Diagrams.

The last think that I want to say is that the first book makes a reference to naked mole rats – cool!