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Timelike Infinity

1997Stephen Baxter

4.5/5

But wait. There was something new.Out of the blocks this novel scratched a sensawunda itch that was causing me no small amount of reading distress (I haven’t really been reading a lot of books for the last three years, and I was desperately looking for something to kickstart my reading obsession again). I’ve had the Xeelee omnibus lying around for ages, and I’d read Raft some time back, but never got around to Timelike Infinity even though it was on my “to-read” shortlist. Now, even though this is the second book in the Xeelee sequence, it is nothing like its predecessor. For one thing, the story here takes place a lot earlier in the timeline (only about a 100,000 years, give or take) and for another, while Raft deals with an isolated event, Timelike Infinity takes place in deep space and introduces the space-time elements and quantum physics that is so integral to the sequence.He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions that encompassed the universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light that shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows.Timelike Infinity is chock and block full of wonder, and casually juggles brobdingnagian ideas and cool science as if it is absolutely nothing. From the construction of wormholes to towing one to the Galactic Centre (and back, no less) to exploit relativistic time dilation effects… and much more. The novel features just enough exposition to truly make the reader believe. As a set-up novel it succeeds fantastically, because, consider: this whole story actually just sets up the heavy-hitter of the series, namely Ring. And speaking of which, Baxter has probably come up with what is probably the craziest artifact to ever grace the pages of a Sci-Fi novel (please comment below if you disagree, since I would be keen to investigate the competition). ”A Ring. A torus. Composed of some unknown, crystalline substance. A thousand light-years across. Rotating at a respectable fraction of the speed of light.It was massive. It had caused a well in spacetime so deep that it was drawing in galaxies, including Earth's Milky Way, from across hundreds of millions of light-years.It is an artifact. A Xeelee construct. [He] watched the Xeelee build it."All this is chucked in rather casually here. A sort of a teaser, if you will. The details will no doubt be forthcoming in Ring. The technical bombardment of quantum physics jargon will likely be enough to leave me bruised and senseless for a week. Baxter is no slouch at this type of thing.As for the Xeelee themselves. They are introduced here as enigmatic and godlike, basically so far removed from any other sentient life as can possibly be. For example: spacefaring races all vie for leftover Xeelee tech, since it is basically the only way to make any sort of progress among the stars, even though nobody really seems to understand it. However, they take no active part in the story being told, which just adds to their mystery. Black hole evaporation would continue, with the eventual shrinking and disappearance of event horizons even on the scale of galaxies and clusters of galaxies; and naked singularities would emerge into the spreading sweep of spacetime. Perhaps the universe could not exist beyond the formation of a naked singularity. Perhaps the formation of such a flaw would cause the cessation of time and space, the ending of being.Oh, really? But of course. If you say so.Rating?What a no-brainer: a hundred billion stars!Added to favourites (duh)

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