Vacuum Diagrams

Annotation

Ironically, you'll probably appreciate Vacuum Diagrams most after you've put it down. The prolific and acclaimed Stephen Baxter has always been praised for his imaginative and conscientious use of science, and Vacuum Diagrams is no exception. This collection of short stories will leave you ruminating for days over the sprawl of ideas, worlds, and life forms Baxter has woven together.

Filling in the gaps on Baxter's ambitious, almost audacious, 10-million-year timeline called the "Xeelee Sequence," Vacuum Diagrams is a collection of revised, previously published short stories that bridges together his popular novels set in this same "future history" -- Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, and Ring. Baxter's universe is rotten with life, from strange tree-stump-like creatures with superfluid ice skeletons to dark matter "birds" to sentient beings composed of pure mathematics. And Baxter's reverence for life's beauty, for its voracious robustness, is hard to resist -- especially when it comes to humanity and its tentative, eager rise. The cycling timeline follows humans as they come into their own as a star-faring race, from their first sporadic steps to their near dominance of the universe and beyond.

Vacuum Diagrams is a great introduction to Baxter for those unfamiliar with him and a good primer for the other "Xeelee Sequence" novels. If you already love Baxter or the other novels in the sequence, Vacuum Diagrams is certainly a safe bet. Besides, any book that sends you scurrying quizzically after your college physics text deserves a closer look. Check it out.

--Paul Hughes (from amazon.com)

• Vacuum Diagrams
  • Foreword
  • Eve
  • PART 1
    • The Sun-People
    • The Logic Pool
    • Gossamer
    • Cilia-of-Gold
    • Lieserl
  • PART 2
    • Pilot
    • The Xeelee Flower
    • More Than Time or Distance
    • The Switch
  • PART 3
    • Blue Shift
    • The Quagma Datum
    • Planck Zero
  • PART 4
    • The Godel Sunflowers
    • Vacuum Diagrams
  • PART 5
    • Stowaway
    • The Tyranny of Heaven
    • Hero
  • PART 6
    • Secret History
  • PART 7
    • Shell
    • The Eighth Room
    • The Baryonic Lords
    • C.A.D. 500,000,000
  • Epilogue
  • The Xeelee Sequence-Timeline
  • Permissions
  • About the Author
• notes
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6

Vacuum Diagrams
by Stephen Baxter

For Malcolm Eduards, David Pringle, and Chris Schelling

Foreword

Vacuum Diagrams is a novel based on the short stories which -- together with my novels Raft (1991), Timelike Infinity (1992), Flux (1993), and Ring (1994) -- comprise my "Xeelee Sequence" Future History.

The stories, written between 1987 and 1995, have been revised for this edition; a new timeline is appended; references to the novels are included as footnotes, and a new short story ("Eve") has been included as bridging material.

Of the twenty-two stories included here, four were first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, one in SF Age, one in a Writers Of The Future anthology, and eight in Interzone. Two ("Lieserl" and "Cilia-of-Gold") have been included in annual Legend Year's Best SF collections, edited by Gardner Dozois. The other stories mostly appeared in small-press magazines and, while fans are aware of the pieces, they have been largely unavailable before this collection.

Eve

A.D. 5664

The Ghost cruiser hovered between Earth and Moon.

The ship was a rough ovoid, woven from silvered rope. Instrument clusters and energy pods were knotted to the walls. Around me, Ghosts clung to the rope like grapes to a vine.