Customer Reviews

Transcendent

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Transcendent is Baxter at the top of his form. This is science fiction that confronts the big questions without hesitation. Interestingly, what we have in Transcendent is a more morally-ambiguous version of Orson Card's The Worthing Chronicle; frankly, the stories are astonishingly similiar. To be sure, Mr. Baxter's style bears little resemblance to Mr. Card's more introspective fiction; however, the differences are intriguing and underscore the broad scope of the ideas presented by the narratives. Both books treat the theme of humanity's ultimate destiny by taking the assumption that humanity will someday be forced to confront the implications of unlimited power over space, matter and time.

Can pain and suffering be banished from the world? What is a perfect society? What makes us human? This book rounds out a trilogy that explores these themes in depth. Baxter is fascinated with the principle of emergence and it shows in his fiction--the concept of the hive mind or "coalescence" is also a prominent theme in this work as are the ideas of how humanity might confront victory over aging and disease, the ability to read the minds of others, or whether intelligence is necessary to a meaningful existence. This book touches on all these issues.

Whether it is merely a plot device or reflective of the author's opinions, the "die back" and global warming themes are as prevalent in Baxter's writings as the energy crisis and population explosion themes were in early 70s science fiction. In Transcendent the pending ecological collapse provides a focus on the theme that humans are at least as expert at getting themselves into trouble as they are in getting out of trouble. One wonders, however, whether Mr. Baxter could have dreamed up something more serious than what are, essentially, tundra farts.

Though I was more satisfied with Mr. Card's resolution of the issue of unlimited power, I must admit that Transcendent made me think harder about the questions presented. Mr. Baxter seems awfully reticent to admit that he is treading upon religious ground, exploring the nature of God--however God may be defined. Though Baxter's God (the combination of post-human intelligences known as the "Transcendence") can't seem to reconcile human suffering with human perfection, perhaps the conclusion of this book is meant to show that regardless of all the philosophical arguments to be made, humanity will figure things out in the end even if the forms are not strictly obeyed.

Stephen Baxter remains a "must purchase" author--his fiction forces one to confront deeply held values and to ponder the essence of what life is about. Indeed, I have high praise for an author who does not hesitate to threaten or destroy the entire planet in order to tell a story--and then provides a story that is ultimately uplifting and life-affirming.

Of the three books in the Destiny's Children series, this has turned out to be my favorite. Stephen Baxter has continuously amazed me with his ability to tie complex physics, theories of evolution, and far flug timelines, into a tight and readable story, but this time he has perhaps done more. This is by far his most "human" story. It clings tightly to the suffering of its main character Michael Poole, and digs more deeply than any of his other books into philosophy and the heart of the human condition. Nonetheless it is packed full of Baxter's deep ideas in physics and technology.

A very engaging and rewarding book to read for any SciFi fan, and a must for any Baxter fan. He may yet produce his own "Stranger in a Strange Land."

Earth in the year 2027 is a different place to be due to the climatic changes; the poles melted, the oceans rose and coastal flooding changes the geography of the planet. The planet seems to be in its death throes with levels of carbon dioxide and methane rising but scientist Michael Poole has devised a way to keep the gases that want to escape trapped way below the earth. While he and his fellow scientists are working on the problem, his wife Morag dead for seventeen year, keeps appearing to him. He wants to prove she is real and not a ghost.

Fifty thousands years in the future Alia who lives on a space station Witnesses Michael (learning facets of his life from birth to death). Humanity is guarded by the Transcendence, superminds who are on the verge of singularity and are ready to take the next step in man's evolution. Yet something is holding them back from that; they want Alia to join them and hope they can find the redemption to move on. Alia, who learns what being in transcendence is like is not sure that is the road she wants to travel but to save humanity, she must allow the transcendence to bend space and time so that she can find answers that only Michael Poole can supply.

Told in alternating chapters from the point of view of Michael in the first person and Alia in the third readers get a close up look at humanity at two very different crossroads of its existence. This is a thought provoking exciting work of science fiction with visual description of radically different time frames that seem realistic to the audience. The finale to Destiny's Children trilogy is a very satisfying and enriching reading experience.

Harriet Klausner

Transcendent takes the fun of transcendental philosophy and merges it with the raw excitement of project management. It's not just boring - it's unfocused, too: Transcendent is part sci-fi, part eco-thriller, part family drama, and part ghost story.

The bulk of the book revolves around Michael Poole, who splits his time between chasing the ghost of his dead wife and starting an eco-recovery business. The "ghost story" subplot (which culminates in a excorcism, believe it or not) seems out of place in a sci-fi novel such as this, and is wrapped up in a lot of religious and philosophical psychobabble. Likewise, Stephen is a little heavy-handed with the message of ecological responsibility, and spends too much time going through the mundane details of the startup and business deals for Poole's eco-recovery project.

The other 33% of the book revolves around Alia, who has to answer some questions about/for the godlike Transcendence, a meta-mind that's stumbling over some very basic facts of life. Even more rediculous is that the Transencdence, which is "beyond the farthest imagining of mere humans", has a proposed solution to its problem which basically amounts to "take my ball and go home." I can say no more without giving anything away, but the universe's supermind seems to have the intellect of a walnut.

It's not just the Transcendence who has issues. The Poole family relations are a non-stop car wreck, a subplot which makes the book feel like a soap opera at times. In particular, the protagonist's adult son spends the entire novel acting like a spoiled 12-year old. Likewise, the book never explains why the Transcendence would want to "join" with Alia, who also comes off as both incredibly selfish and immature.

It's also fairly odd that, 500,000 years in the future, "Lethe" is still being used as an interjection. The origin of the term is presented here, but it's fairly odd that it would stick around for for a length of time that's much greater than the length of recorded human history. Nobody uses terms like "baloney" or "balderdash" anymore, and those were in use a century ago. 500,000 years? Come on.

Last but not least, anyone who makes it past the final 50 pages deserves an honorary doctorate in philosophy. You'll be able to discuss the ontology and philosophy behind the meaning of love and intellect with the best of them. Unfortunately, you have to read through a grad school term paper to get any closure out of this book. I was tempted - multiple times - to just chalk this one up to a loss and start on something else. Mr. Baxter, you can do better.

What do you get when you mix global warming, an artificial intelligence named Gea (instead of Gaia), German idealist Friedrich Schelling, Catholic mystic Teilhard de Chardin, Russian Orthodox mystic philosopher Nikolai Federov, and a guilt-ridden far-future post-human networked mind in need of atonement? Apparently, you get reams of turgid telling-not-showing exposition followed by soporific sermons about how humans can transcend themselves to become gods (or, as in the case of the net-mind Transcendence, a sort of Godnet 2.0).

Perhaps the soul of this book is the Catholic Priest character, Rosa (of course the Vatican has lightened up on that male Priest thing), who tells us Federov drew on "Marxist historical determinism, socialist utopianism, and deeper wells of Slavic theology and nationalism to come up with a 'Cosmism,' which preached an ultimate unity between man and the universe." As you can see, Rosa has the soul of a GRE question writer on a bender at the Burning Man festival.

I love a rip-roaring space opera. I also love mind-bending far-future speculation. Unfortunately, this book is neither rip-roaring nor mind-bending. Take a pass.

OK, I liked the IDEA of the book - the important guy in 2050 who is being studied ("witnessed") by a girl 500,000 years in the future. Of course he is someone important historically (why choose an average Joe?) and she is also undergoing her own private journey. When an author undertakes a vision of the future there are two possible avenues: (1) An entirely new creation, i.e. Dune or (2) a version of the present with similar problems (usually ecological). Baxter has opted for the latter.

I agree with Ray Kurzweil ("The Singularity is Near") that much science fiction is tainted with futures of uneven scientific progress to the extreme - some advances are visionary while others seem stuck in the 19th century. In this case, smart materials and a clean method of energy production have been invented yet cars and planes are banned(!) I mean, there's 200 mpg engines on the books now - wouldn't somebody adopt this new energy source for travel??? Our hero designs spaceships to the stars yet we are helpless with global warming. The world seems sterile, almost depopulated (despite the so-called population boom) and the work done is the type found only in sci-fi (key on a PC for a couple of hours and that's your job). 500,000 years from now folks live for a few hundred years (another not so loud "wow"). You'd think that creatures who could teleport, travel in time and change their bodies at will would have extended their life span a tad longer. Inventions in 2047 include implants for communication, VR and automated public transportation - underwhelming to say the least.

Sometimes an author can pull it off and the hero or heroine remains in the mind months later. This is not the case. The characters here are quite forgettable as are the relationships that seem artificial. Then there is the whole idea of Transcendence and the mythology surrounding it. We can not imagine a future 30 years from now (with smart materials, robotics, bioengineering and nanotech). It is that much harder to project a future 500,000 years in the future. But the problem is not a lack of imagination but a lack of future knowledge. My grade: B-

I suppose it only made sense, after reading the previous two books, for Baxter to have wound up here. I mean, after Exultant, what was really left? I was hoping he would have tied things together, and continued the story. Instead, we fast forward from "now" to 500,000 years from now (whereas Exultant was 25,000 years from today, and coalescent was -1,500 years from today). Like the other two books, we have two plot threads. The nearer takes place in the near term future, in a somewhat contrived description of a pre-global-warming-apocalypse earth, with Yet Another Damn Poole taking the lead role (a bit like his Reid Malenfant in the Manifold series, which I grew to detest).

The other thread is what most irritated me. While I appreciated his grand tour of the possibilities of human evolution, I was put off by his wide-eyed speculation and what-if's. Many of the things he describes are fundamentally plausible, in the way that drag racing possibilities can be speculated on paper. But they ring hollow. Sure, you can described silicon-based life, but is it plausible? And the humans-made-dolphins (again, from Manifold) show up again, being equally silly this time around.

But, that's not really the worst of the book. Towards the end, the book lapses into navel-gazing, much in the way Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion does in the later part of the series. Sadly, it's just as hard to wrap your head around. The philosophical meandering doesn't make much sense, and seems to have very little to do with the previous books, or indeed the rest of the Xeelee Sequence. Certainly it's a departure from Ring, which was frankly an impressive epic set in the same sequence. But, really, what choice did he have by setting the environment half a million years from now?

The "contemporary" thread (set in the 2050's) is... "interesting," but also seems to borrow from the Malenfant stick figure he has developed elsewhere (and indeed the Peter character from Coalescent re-appears in this book with a different name, but the same physical description, neuroses, and agenda), as well as the notions in John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up. Sure, it made sense in Brunner's take on things, but we've _read_ that already. There's no sense in an educated engineer getting all misty eyed about global warming in a book set half a million years in the future.

So, sadly, the last book (although a fourth book, with short stories from the rest of the Coalescent books, has just been published) finishes the series by wobbling between "why am I reading this" and "this is just entirely silly."

Exultant is worth a read, but could probably be thrown into the Xeelee Sequence and read alongside Ring. Coalescent and Transcendant, I could do without.

I've read a lot of Baxter and this one didn't deliver for me. I Actually looked forward to finishing the book and calculating how much longer it would take. I finished because I'm somewhat compulsive.

From earlier titles, it is obvious that Baxter is very comfortable with physics, cosmology, and the related mathematics. His story lines tend to have characters swept through events based on grand concepts such as entropy, resource starvation, no faster than light travel (FTL), etc.

In transcendent, the storyline is character based and the basic physics and math seem lost. FTL allows the protagonist to check stuff out all over the galaxy. Kind of a staple sci fi plot device. Throw in time travel via closing the universe in four dimensions, hmmm, OK. The approach to the mathematics of infinity, however, left me a little cold. A younger Baxter would have trotted out a convergence proof and embedded it into the story. Here, there is a hand wave that infinites collide with magical results.

Finally, there's the poor haunted Poole. Why is it so popular these days that when a character sees a ghost/vision/halucination that they get pathetic? Recall Nash in "A Beautiful Mind" who, on realizing that he sees people who aren't there, mediates his reaction to them? Contrast Baltar in battlestar galactica who partially reacts to his cylon babe vision as if he doesn't know how crazy he looks. At least Baltar remains functional. Poole just gets pathetic. In a realistic storyline, Poole would have been shunted to an alley to mumble at a gin bottle.

Sadly, Poole is the most developed character in a character driven book. I put him at 2.3 dimensions and thereby able to fill a 3 dimensional space given arbitrarly large effort.

Admittedly, tying in some philosophical bits was OK, but it is obvious that Baxter lived physics and dabbled in philosophy. As they say: "Write what you know."

Stephen Baxter's books are mandatory for my sci-fi fix; his idea matrices are far-reaching. He explores near future themes with far-future themes, and his depictions of Earth in these time periods are always entrancing. They are indeed the highlights of this book, when the main characters of the future 500,000 years from now return to earth and observe the origins of mankind's expansion into the galaxy. The themes of imminent ecological collapse and the human attempt in the near future to correct these imbalances is current and scientifically believeable.

The main story of Michael Poole and the visitation of his dead wife and of his strained relationship with his brother and son, however, are pushed to the point of melodrama. The conflicts in their family dynamic detract way too much from the overall science of the book; I for one want to get completely lost in the feel of future worlds and societies and not in the maudlin particularities of family life. I loved the visions of how the human hive that was introduced in Coalescent evolved over time, and this connection to the first book of this trilogy was in my view brilliant and enjoyable. I think Stephen Baxter is trying too hard to develop dramatic dialogue; much of the conversations between Michael and his weird brother and son seemed so immature and simplistic given the breathtaking scope of the book.

All in all, though, I pretty intense read, but unlikely will I revisit the book any time soon, like I do with Manifold:Space, Evolution, and Time Ships, three books I can read over and over again.

Natural extinction events come and go. When seen through depths of time, extinction events seem massive and merciless; but when seen as a whole they just become part of the tableau of history, necessary clearances that help make way for selection pressures to improve other species. Nature always seems to make its way through these "bottlenecks", and humans are no different--they squeeze through bottlenecks throughout Stephen Baxter's "Destiny's Children" series, sometimes as a result of wars and dislocations between each other, and other times through wars between humanity and mysterious alien forces. Sometimes social pressures attempt to jump-start the selection process, creating stable coalescences and archives of information or else by launching religions to pull humanity away from the brink.

But what happens if human consciousness succeeds in carrying the species into an almost omnipotent state, where life expectancies become almost endless, the very fabric of space-time is under human control, and an emergent meta-consciousness arises to link individual minds? Need humans ever be concerned about extinction again? Might there be one last "bottleneck" to get through, though, that of consciousness itself? Can even an advanced consciousness resist the temptation to "meddle" in its own history, to seek to rectify all of the past suffering and strife of the species by removing the species completely from history? To, in essence, seek extinctive suicide as the only means to correct historical wrongs?

As always, Stephen Baxter explores deeply profound concepts, but this latest outing is not up to the task. As part of a series, "Transcendent" does little to unite with the themes of "Coalescent" and "Exultant". The Poole family is back--even George gets to show his age--but while the Pooles of "Coalescent" were well-written characters struggling through the generations, the Pooles of "Transcendent" seem shallow and petty. Michael Poole (George's nephew) emerges as the fulcrum of human history, but long before the end of the book I found myself thinking, "This character is too flat for this role." It becomes very hard to care about the characters in "Transcendent", and he themes in "Exultant" receive only a couple of quick mentions. These books could have stood alone to tell their stories, and would have been more satisfying to me had they not been linked by a series. "Coalescent" rambled, though parts of that story were captivating; "Exultant" was tightly written, in my opinion the best of the three; and as for "Transcendent"...well, there are some fascinating concepts going on, but from the standpoint of story I found the book to be weak, with no emotional linkages or closure for the characters of the earlier books.