By and large, it is accepted that the Thull were real.This is probably because the most advanced war-fighting technology the Thull had were steak knives and tinfoil shielding. To everyone’s surprise it obliterates the Thull spaceship and every one on-board. It has surprisingly good aim, and actually collides with the spaceship before detonating. Suddenly a transmission from orbit washes over the planet! Oh no! An alien race, calling themselves the “Thull”, has suddenly arrived in their spaceship and declares war on our race, threatening genocide! They are undoubtedly real, as anyone with a moderately powerful telescope can see their ship in orbit, and there was an obvious effect as their ship “slowed down” or ”transferred from hyperspace” or method it used to travel.Īcting quickly and perhaps rashly, one of the governments of the world sends a nuke up. Luru Parz, one of the team, realises that the Xeelee will eventually return, and returns to Earth to ready its defences for when the return happens.It’s just another average day in the life of modern day earth. After a brutal fight to reach the surface of the black hole, the team commence their assault, causing the Xeelee to abandon it (and the rest of the Milky Way galaxy) to prevent humanity from harming the black hole's inhabitants.Īfter the assault, the protagonists realise that the Coalition is unlikely to remain intact, now that the war with the Xeelee is no longer present to hold it together. Regardless, the assault on the black hole continues despite protestations from Nilis. Meanwhile, in the course of his new duties to Commissary Nilis, Pirius Red is practically taken on a tour of the Solar System and some of the Coalition's most scandalous secrets, rife with references to events from previous books in the Xeelee sequence.Īs Nilis's project nears completion, it transpires that the Chandra black hole is home to not only the Xeelee, but a host of other organisms, many of which are based on exotic physics and non-baryonic matter. While Nilis and his new team struggle to confront ossified government and military institutions, they try to understand and to develop new and sometimes alien technologies: FTL computers, a gravastar shield to protect them from FTL foreknowledge, and a black hole gun, capable of disrupting a supermassive black hole's event horizon. Using the Xeelee fighter and the innovative tactics that saved Pirius Blue, he starts to plan an unheard of assault on the Xeelee's primary stronghold at Chandra itself. Pirius Blue is sent to a penal unit at the front as a foot soldier, and Pirius Red is remanded to the custody of Commissary Nilis, who has plans for the fruits of Pirius Blue's battlefield victory. Rather than being lauded as a hero, both instances of Pirius are court-martialed for disobeying orders.Ĭommissary Nilis of the Office of Technological Archival and Control, part of the Commission for Historical Truth, defends both the older Pirius (whom he calls "Pirius Blue") and the younger one ("Pirius Red") but loses the trial. Returning to base via FTL travel, he arrives two years previous to the battle, when his younger self is still a cadet. In a desperate gamble to outrun a pursuing Xeelee, Pirius captures a Xeelee fighter for the first time in history. When a battle turns to disaster for the Coalition forces, he disobeys suicide orders to stand and fight, choosing instead to risk survival. ![]() Pirius is a fighter pilot stationed at the front. In a war fought with faster-than-light technology (equivalent to time travel), each side has foreknowledge of the other's actions and can develop counter-measures to plans before they are made. The mysterious Xeelee are far more advanced but less numerous than the humans, and the war has been at a stalemate for three millennia even though the entire Coalition has been directed toward the war effort and ten billion humans die at the front every year. Baxter also sketches the evolution of the Xeelee and an imaginary history of the universe in which life is ubiquitous even under the most extreme conditions.Įxultant is set in Baxter's " Xeelee Sequence" twenty thousand years into the Third Expansion of Mankind, "a titanic project undertaken by a mankind united by the Doctrines forged by Hama Druz after mankind's near extinction." The human-supremacist Interim Coalition of Governance has conquered almost the whole Milky Way - all but the alien Xeelee concentrated at the galactic core around a supermassive black hole called Chandra. Much of the book is written as large sections of prose explaining theoretical exotic-matter physics. The book was published by Victor Gollancz Ltd in September 2004. ![]() It is part two of the Destiny's Children series. Exultant is a science fiction novel by British author Stephen Baxter.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |