Category: Livres anglais et trangers,Science Fiction & Fantasy,Science Fiction
Vacuum Diagrams Details
"And everywhere the Humans went, they found life ..."This dazzling future history, winner of the 2000 Philip K. Dick Award, is the most ambitious and exciting since Asimov's classic Foundation saga. It tells the story of Humankind -- all the way to the end of the Universe itself.Here, in luminous and vivid narratives spanning five million years, are the first Poole wormholes spanning the solar system; the conquest of Human planets by Squeem; GUTships that outrace light; the back-time invasion of the Qax: the mystery and legacy of the Xeelee, and their artifacts as large as small galaxies; photino birds and Dark Matter; and the Ring, where Ghost, Human, and Xeelee contemplate the awesome end of Time.Stephen Baxter is the most acclaimed and accomplished of a brilliant new generation of authors who are expanding the vision of science fiction and taking itto a new golden age.
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Reviews
This is a collection of short stories that gave me entertaining moments reading it. The stories were written between 1987 and 1995 and were revised to add up into the different chapters of a novel spanning several million years. There are some good ideas, expressed with freshness, even if most of them have been already used by a number of authors. I was impressed by the first novelette that deals nicely with a creature made of ice living using a super fluid helium blood, allowing it to move under the very light gravity of the asteroid it has been born onto, beyond the orbit of Pluto. The next one is interesting also, the story of a sentient algorithm that ends up in killing its human author. I encountered such ideas as "living" algorithms in several novels, like the Hyperion series from Dan SIMMONS or Vast from Linda NAGATA; but this novelette presents the thing with inventiveness.The bulk of the collection is that of the expansion of the humans into the universe, who overcome very potent adversaries like the Qax species but eventually are stopped then defeated by far superior beings, the Xeelee. But the story doesn't come to a halt there, for a tiny fragment of humanity has been preserved in a cache set in another dimension, and after several million years they emerge from it to stare at the Xeelee fleeing from entities even more potent than themselves. They have built a portal to another dimension, letting photino matter creatures destroy the stars of the universe.
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