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This short story originally appeared in Science Fiction Age, May 1996. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF 2 (1997), edited by David G. Hartwell, and The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures: New Tales by the Heirs of Jules Verne (2005), edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown. The story is included in the collection Traces (1998).

Stretching from the distant past into the remote future, from primordial Earth to the stars, Evolution is a soaring symphony of struggle, extinction, and survival; a dazzling epic that combines a dozen scientific disciplines and a cast of unforgettable characters to convey the grand drama of evolution in all its awesome majesty and rigorous beauty.

Sixty-five million years ago, when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, there lived a small mammal, a proto-primate of the species Purgatorius. From this humble beginning, Baxter traces the human lineage forward through time. The adventure that unfolds is a gripping odyssey governed by chance and competition, a perilous journey to an uncertain destination along a route beset by sudden and catastrophic upheavals. It is a route that ends, for most species, in stagnation or extinction. Why should humanity escape this fate?

What would happen to the world if the sun went out?

New epic sci-fi from Stephen Baxter, the award-winning author whose credits include co-authorship of the Long Earth series with Terry Pratchett.

By the middle of the 21st century, humanity has managed to overcome a series of catastrophic events and maintain some sense of stability. Space exploration has begun again. Science has led the way.

But then one day, the sun goes out. Solar panels are useless, and the world begins to freeze

Earth begins to fall out of its orbit.

The end is nigh.

Someone has sent us a sign.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #105 March 1996. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection (1997), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Traces (1998).

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in the anthology The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction (2007), edited by George Mann. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Two (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahan, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection (2008), edited by Gardner Dozois and Alien Contact (2012), edited by Marty Halpern. It is included in the collection Last and First Contacts (2012).

This short story originally appeared in the collection Obelisk (2016). It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Hugo Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Science Fiction Age, March 1997. The story can also be found in the anthologis The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection (1998), edited by Gardner Dozois and Other Worlds Than These (2012), edited by John Joseph Adams.

Read the full story for free at Infinity plus.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Fast Forward 1 (2007), edited by Lou Anders. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 13 (2008), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Last and First Contacts (2012).

A remarkable collection of short stories and novellas from one of our greatest SF authors.

This collection contains stories set in the worlds of the bestselling duology ULTIMA and PROXIMA, which expand on the characters and worlds of that series, including a brand new never-before-published novella. There are also a selection of alternate histories and possible futures, building on Baxter's work with Terry Pratchett on the LONG EARTH series.

Confirms Stephen Baxter's place as one of the greatest practitioners of the SF short story.

Table of Contents:

• On Chryse Plain - (2011) - shortstory
• A Journey to Amasia - (2012) - shortstory
• Obelisk - (2012) - shortstory
• Escape from Eden - shortstory
• The Jubilee Plot - (2008) - shortstory
• Fate and the Fire-lance - (2008) - novelette
• The Unblinking Eye - (2009) - shortstory
• Darwin Anathema - (2010) - shortstory
• Mars Abides - shortstory
• Eagle Song - (2008) - shortstory
• The Pevatron Rats - (2009) - novelette
• The Invasion of Venus - (2010) - shortstory
• Turing's Apples - (2008) - shortstory
• Artefacts - shortstory
• Vacuum Lad - (2010) - shortstory
• Rock Day - (2011) - shortstory
• StarCall - (2013) - shortstory

Hugo, Locus and Sturgeon Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2000. It can also be found in the anthologies Space Soldiers (2001) edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection (2001), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. It is included in the collection Resplendent (2006).

This short story originally apperared in the anthology Moon Shots (1999), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2000), Worldmakers: SF Adventures in Terraforming (2001), Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction (2005), all edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Eagle Has Landed: 50 Years of Lunar Science Fiction, (2019), edited by Neil Clarke.

This novelette originally appeared in the anthology We Think, Therefore We Are (2009), edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 15 (2010), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Kramer. The story is included in the collection Last and First Contacts (2012).

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2005. I can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Third Annual Collection (2006), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF (2010), edited by Mike Ashley. The story is included in the collection Last and First Contacts (2012).

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, April 2000. The story can also be found in the anthology Beyond Flesh (2002), edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere (2002).

Read the full story for free at Infinity Plus.

Liverpool 1962. A place and time of danger and passion. A thrilling new music is bursting on to the grey streets of the post-war city. A music that electrifies. A music that promises to change everything. But in Cuba, on the other side of the earth, nuclear tensions are at breaking point. The end of the whole world could be just days away. At the heart of it all is 14-year-old Laura Mann. She's on the run, hunted by strange forces fighting over the future of humanity. And Laura's about to discover that her own life is at stake - in ways she could never have imagined...

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Engineering Infinity (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Ninth Annual Collection (2012), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Six (2012), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Obelisk (2016).

From Arthur C. Clarke, the brilliant mind that brought us 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Stephen Baxter, one of the most cogent SF writers of his generation, comes a novel of a day, not so far in the future, when the barriers of time and distance have suddenly turned to glass.

When a brilliant, driven industrialist harnesses cutting-edge physics to enable people everywhere, at trivial cost, to see one another at all times--around every corner, through every wall--the result is the sudden and complete abolition of human privacy, forever. Then the same technology proves able to look backward in time as well. The Light of Other Days is a story that will change your view of what it is to be human.

In the aftermath of the First Martian War, in the interim between it and what was to come later, England seemed to once again become a green and peaceful place, if one haunted by the terrible events in Surrey that had happened in those early years of the century. Although people hoped and prayed peace had come, they were wrong. Across the gulf of space, plans were being drawn for a return, but before they could bear fruit a terrible discovery was made deep in Holmburgh Wood, one that would tear a family apart and shock the world.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Inspired by Sir Arthur C. Clarke's short story A Meeting with Medusa, this novel, with permission from the Clarke Estate, continues the story of Commander Howard Falcon over centuries of space-exploration, interaction with AI, first contact and beyond. All brought to life by two of our greatest SF authors, Stephen Baxter and Alastair Reynolds.

Howard Falcon almost lost his life in an accident... and a combination of human ingenuity and technical expertise brought him back. Not as himself, but as an augmented human: part man, part machine, and exceptionally capable.

The Medusa Chronicles charts his journey through time, the changing interaction between humanity and our universe, and combined moments of incredible action with unparalleled exploration of and expansion into space. A compelling read from the beginning, this is classic SF which has appeal for readers who like Gravity and The Martian.

Sidewise Award nominated novelette. It originally appeared in the anthology The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction (2006) edited by Mike Ashley. The story can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection (2007), edited by Gardner Dozois. It is included in the collection Last and First Contacts (2012).

The Spacetime Pit Plus Two collects three collaborative stories by two of science fiction's finest writers. Never before published in one volume, the triptych showcases the authors' ability to create narratives on a vast scale, and yet never to lose sight of the all-important human element.

In the award-winning 'The Spacetime Pit', spacer Katerina Wake crash-lands on a primitive alien world and faces certain death unless she can harness her ingenuity, and technical know-how, to bend the destiny of an entire race to her will...

'Green-Eyed Monster' follows Richard as he wakes up after a night on the tiles to find himself inhabiting the body of a toad - and that's just the start of his troubles...

In 'Sunfly', Onara and her people live on a world very different from our own - a vast ribbon encircling a sun. But a change is coming to the land, a mysterious narrowing that threatens not only the stability of her world, but the very order of everything she has taken for granted.

Table of Contents:

• 9 - Introduction (The Spacetime Pit Plus Two) - essay by Eric Brown
• 13 - The Spacetime Pit - (1996) - novelette by Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown
• 53 - Green-Eyed Monster - (2000) - short story by Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown
• 77 - Sunfly - (1995) - short fiction by Stephen Baxter and Eric Brown

In 2145AD John Hackett's adventure is just beginning.

In Year 30, Mela's story is coming to a close.

Hackett, in his trusty ship the Perseus, is not just a space traveller - beginning his travels with an expedition to Neptune and back - but, thanks to the time-dilation effect, a time traveller as well. His new mission will take him to Andromeda, to get a close-up look at the constellation which will eventually crash into the Milky Way, and give humanity a heads-up about the challenges which are coming.

A mission which will take him five million years to complete.

Not only is Hackett exploring unknown space, but he will return to a vastly different time.

Mela's world is coming to an end. Erosion is eating away at the edges of every landmass - first at a rate of ten metres a year, but fast accelerating, displacing people and animals as the rising Tide destroys everything in its path. Putting more and more pressure on the people - and resources - which remain.

She and her people have always known that this long-predicted end to their home, one of the Thousand Earths, is coming - but that makes their fight to survive, to protect each other, no less desperate... and no less doomed.

Stories set in a variety of futures from the award-winning heir of Arthur C. Clarke: Traces gives a kaleidoscopic vision of the possibilities for humankind.

There are vision of histories which differ from our own, either through small changes--what if Germany had won WWI ('Mittelwelt')--or through a fundamental difference in physical laws--what if Archimedes had been right in his clockwork-like cosmological vision ('No Longer Touch the Earth').

There are visions of futures in which people struggle to survive in a variety of bizarre environments ('Downstream', 'The Blood of Angels'), or, weakened and powerless, inhabit the end of worlds ('Inherit the Earth', 'George and the Comet').

There are explorations of astonishing events of our own lifetimes, in particular the grand expansion into space ('Zemlya', 'Moon Six', 'Pilgrim 7').

These visions give an impression of the contingency of our everyday here-and-now, surrounded as it is by an infinite array of possible pasts, presents, and futures.

Table of Contents:

• Traces - (1991) - shortstory
• Darkness - (1995) - shortstory
• The Droplet - (1989) - shortstory
• No Longer Touch the Earth - (1993) - shortstory
• Mittelwelt - (1994) - shortstory
• Journey to the King Planet - (1990) - novelette
• The Jonah Man - (1989) - shortstory
• Downstream - (1993) - shortstory
• The Blood of Angels - (1994) - shortstory
• Columbiad - (1996) - shortstory
• Brigantia's Angels - (1995) - shortstory
• Weep for the Moon - (1992) - shortstory
• Good News - (1994) - shortstory
• Something for Nothing - (1988) - shortstory
• In the Manner of Trees - (1992) - shortstory
• Pilgrim 7 - (1993) - shortstory
• Zemlya - (1997) - shortstory
• Moon Six - (1997) - novelette
• George and the Comet - (1991) - shortstory
• Inherit the Earth - (1992) - shortstory
• In the MSOB - (1996) - shortstory
• Afterword - (1998) - essay by Stephen Baxter

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Eclipse Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy (2008), edited by Jonathan Strahah. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (2009), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Three (2009), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Obelisk (2016).

This novelette originally appeared in the collection Universes (2013). It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection (2014), edited by Gardner Dozois.

Next year. Sea levels begin to rise. The change is far more rapid than any climate change predictions; metres a year. Within two years London, only 15 metres above the sea, is drowned. New York follows, the Pope gives his last address from the Vatican, Mecca disappears beneath the waves. Where is all the water coming from?

Scientists estimate that the earth was formed with seas 30 times in volume their current levels. Most of that water was burnt off by the sun but some was locked in the earth's mantle. For the tip of Everest to disappear beneath the waters would require the seas to triple their volume. That amount of water is still much less than 1% of the earth's volume. And somehow it is being released. The world is drowning. The biblical flood has returned. And the rate of increase is building all the time.

Mankind is on the run, heading for high ground. Nuclear submarines prowl through clouds of corpses rising from drowned cities, populations are decimated and finally the dreadful truth is known. Before 50 years have passed there will be nowhere left to run.

FLOOD tells the story of mankind's final years on earth.The stories of a small group of people caught up in the struggle to survive are woven into a tale of unimaginable global disaster. And the hope offered for a unlucky few by a second great ark...

As the waters rose in FLOOD, high in the Colorado mountains the US government was building an ark. Not an ark to ride the waves but an ark that would take a select few hundred people out into space to start a new future for mankind. Sent out into deep space on an epic journey centuries, generations of crew members carry the hope of a new beginning on a new, incredibly distant, planet. But as the decades pass knowledge and purpose is lost and division and madness grows. And back on earth life, and man, find a new way.

Stephen Baxter is one of preeminent science fiction writers of the current age. This collection showcases his work at its best. Last and First Contacts features ten exceptional stories personally selected by the author, none of which have been collected before and one of which, "Erstkontakt", is brand new, having been written especially for this book. Also included is "Last Contact", which was shortlisted for the Hugo Award.

Table of Contents:

• In Praise of Associations: An Introduction - essay by Ian Whates
• Erstkontakt - short fiction
• In the Abyss of Time - (2006) - short story
• Halo Ghosts - (2000) - short story
• Tempest 43 - (2009) - novelette
• The Children of Time - (2005) - short story
• The Pacific Mystery - (2006) - short story
• No More Stories - (2007) - short story
• Dreamers' Lake - (2006) - short story
• The Long Road - (2006) - short story
• Last Contact - (2007) - short story
• Afterword - essay

For the last decade we really have been waging a secret war against super-villains. It's just as well the general public are too common-sense to believe any of it...

It's 1969. Astronauts have just landed on the moon. In Britain, Harold Wilson is Prime Minister. And the Avengers are on TV. Detective Sergeant Clare Seeley, juggling work and family commitments, is aware of peculiar goings-on at the heart of the concrete-jungle new town that is her patch...

Agnes Doyle, brilliant computer scientist and unwilling precognitive, is about to be plunged into a lethally perilous situation...

The Sergeant and Lucy Pennyweather, gaudy swinging-London adventurers, are drawn to a peculiar conspiracy surrounding a pirate radio ship...

Henry Messen, veteran of the First World War and a special forces operative in the Second under the cover of a bumbling Home Guard officer, is on the track of a fugitive Nazi engineer with a very strange secret...

And Thelma Bennet, head of Project CLIO, the Cross-Agency League of Intelligence Operatives - is closing in on a global threat.

It's 1969. Not as you know it. The way you always thought it was.

Features the characters from previous CLIO novellas "Project Hades" and "Project Herakles", which were published together as The Paradox Conspiracy (2015).

In the grand tradition of Watership Down--A saga of the great and gentle ones

It is a harsh but beautiful world--a remote fastness of shining tundra, rimmed by ice and sea and mountain. Silverhair and her kind have lived here from the earliest Rememberings, when Kilukpuk's children first parted some for the jungle, some into the sea, and some into the rock and ice.

Hear their song! For they are the last of the woolly mammoths, the great, shaggy gentle ones whose bones have greened Earth's grasses through the Long Years, for fifty million springs. Hear their story.

Silverhair is filled with the dreams of youth, and the warmth of Lop-ear's child growing in her belly. But even as her life begins, her world is ending around her. A new menace, more vicious than wolf or bear, is descending upon the snowlands--a two-legged creature that kills for joy, and fouls the Earth for greed. Silverhair and the matriarch, Owlheart, must escape across the glacial torrents, beyond the saw-toothed mountains. They seek help and find it in unexpected sources, including the distant cousins who long ago found their destiny in the green arms of the sea, and from an enemy: an ice-faced menace known as...the Lost.

Stephen Baxter, one of today's most acclaimed writers of science fiction and fantasy, now turns his celebrated talents to a tale that has never before been told or even imagined. Silverhair begins a three-part saga--at once thrilling, heartwarming, and tragic--of a small band of mammoth survivors on a remote arctic island, and what happens when they are discovered by a clever and unpredictable animal they call the Lost.

Silverhair is a story for every age, a tale to remember as long as the footfalls of the great and gentle ones still echo in the shadow of the glaciers--forever.

Even as a young calf, Longtusk understood the hardships the few remaining of his ancient kind had encountered when the glaciers retreated and grassy forests stole over the vast tundra the herds called home. Worst of all was when the Fireheads came -- cruel, two-legged beasts who kill for pleasure. At a tender age, Longtusk became their prisoner, hobbled, abused, and stripped of his freedom. But through toil and terror, Longtusk never forgot his Clan -- and he carried crucial, intimate knowledge of the Fireheads' ways, though at a terrible price.

Now the time is rapidly approaching when he will have to clash with those who seek to destroy every living trace of his proud breed. The dark land before him will be mined with fierce obstacles and awesome challenges. And though it may require the ultimate sacrifice -- and a grim confrontation with the Lost, the most feared enemy of his gargantuan race -- Longtusk must not shun the twisted path in front of him... or what he is destined to become: the greatest hero of them all.

3000 A.D. Years ago, humans colonized Mars, bringing with them specimens of long-extinct Earth life for regeneration on this new frontier. But humankind has disappeared, and the animals have been left behind to fend for themselves. Icebones, daughter of Silverhair, had been the only adult mammoth taken to Mars. As such, she is now the only one of her kind who carries the accumulated knowledge of mammoth history, and it is up to her to teach her fellow mammoths how to survive -- and thrive -- without their human keepers.

In the grand tradition of Watership Down, Stephen Baxter has created a complex society complete with elaborate myths and legends. With Icebones, he brilliantly and dramatically brings the acclaimed Mammoth trilogy to its resounding conclusion.

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2001. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 7 (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere (2002).

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1999. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 5 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere (2002).

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 2000. The story can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell. It is included in the collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere (2002).

Read the full story for free here.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #130 April 1998. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 4 (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere (2002).

The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. But as the world's governments turn inward, one man dares to gamble on a bolder, brighter future. That man--Reid Malenfant--has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the exploration and colonization of space.

Battling national sabotage and international outcry, Malenfant's bootstrap company builds a spacecraft, plots its course, and trains the genetically enhanced Sheena 5 for her one-way journey. As apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, Malenfant launches the rocket. But Sheena has plans of her own. And even as she sets them in motion, the situation on Earth grows more desperate and violent.

Now Malenfant--together with a brilliant but disturbed mathematician, a child prodigy, and his ex-wife--must gamble the very existence of time and space on a single desperate throw of the dice. The odds are a trillion to one against him...

Or are they?

The year is 2020. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, Reid Malenfant ventures to the far edge of the solar system, where he discovers a strange artifact left behind by an alien civilization: A gateway that functions as a kind of quantum transporter, allowing virtually instantaneous travel over the vast distances of interstellar space. What lies on the other side of the gateway? Malenfant decides to find out. Yet he will soon be faced with an impossible choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself.

Meanwhile on Earth the Japanese scientist Nemoto fears her worst nightmares are coming true. Startling discoveries reveal that the Moon, Venus, even Mars once thrived with life, life that was snuffed out not just once but many times, in cycles of birth and destruction. And the next chilling cycle is set to begin again...

In the year 2015, astronaut Reid Malenfant is flying over the African continent, intent on examining a mysterious glowing construct in Earth's orbit. But when the very fabric of the sky tears open, spilling living creatures to the ground and pulling others inside (including his wife, Emma), Malenfant's quest to uncover the unknown becomes personal. While desperately searching to discover what happened to the woman he loves, Malenfant embarks upon an adventure to the very fount of human development... on earth and beyond.

Tied in to Baxter's masterful Manifold trilogy, these thematically linked stories are drawn from the vast graph of possibilities across which the lives of hero Reid Malenfant have been scattered. It is the year 2025. Reid Malenfant is the commander of a NASA earth-orbiting science platform. The platform is intended to probe the planets of the nearest star system by bouncing laser pulses off them. But no echoes are returned... and Malenfant's reality begins to crumble around him. Huddling with his family, awaiting the end - or an unknown new beginning - Malenfant tells stories of other possibilities, other realities.

The linked stories encompass the myriad possibilities that might govern our relationship with the universe: are we truly alone, or will we eventually meet other lifeforms? Perhaps intelligent species decide to turn their back on the stars, or maybe expansionist species are destined to fail. The final possibility - that the Universe as we know it is in fact an elaborate illusion designed to protect us from the fearful reality - is brilliantly explored in the tour de force novella that ends the volume.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Prologue (Phase Space) - short story
• 5 - Moon-Calf - (1998) - short story
• 21 - Open Loops - (2000) - novelette
• 48 - Glass Earth, Inc. - (1997) - novelette
• 70 - Poyekhali 3201 - (1997) - short story
• 86 - Dante Dreams - (1998) - short story
• 104 - War Birds - (1997) - short story
• 127 - Sun-Drenched - (1998) - short story
• 136 - Martian Autumn - (2002) - short story
• 149 - Sun God - (1997) - novelette
• 170 - Sun-Cloud - (2001) - short story
• 185 - Sheena 5 - [Manifold] - (2000) - short story
• 203 - The Fubar Suit - [Manifold] - (1997) - short story
• 220 - Grey Earth - [Manifold] - (2001) - short story
• 236 - Huddle - [Manifold] - (1999) - novelette
• 265 - Refugium - (2002) - short story
• 284 - Lost Continent - (2001) - short story
• 295 - Tracks - (2001) - short story
• 305 - Lines of Longitude - (1997) - short story
• 317 - Barrier - (1998) - novelette (variant of The Barrier)
• 334 - Marginalia - (1999) - short story
• 345 - The We Who Sing - short story
• 356 - The Gravity Mine - (2000) - short story
• 364 - Spindrift - (1999) - short story
• 380 - Touching Centauri - novelette
• 411 - The Twelfth Album - (1998) - short story
• 423 - Afterword (Phase Space) - essay

The story of the US manned space programme of the 1970s and 1980s - as it should have happened. Kennedy is shot in 1963, but not killed, only invalided and forced to retire. Under his uniting influence, the first manned Ares probe lifts off for Mars in 1986.

Paula Benacerraf is appointed to oversee the dismantling of the Shuttle fleet after another disaster. Instead, she listens to the scientist, Rosenberg, who wants to explore the life Cassini discovers on Titan. Humans are hurled to the edge of the Solar System. To the edge, also, of sanity.

It Eats Planets. And It's Here.

It starts when Venus explodes into a brilliant cloud of dust and debris, showering Earth with radiation and bizarre particles that wipe out all the crops and half the life in the oceans, and fry the ozone layer. Days later, a few specks of moon rock kicked up from the last Apollo mission fall upon a lava crag in Scotland. That's all it takes...

Suddenly, the ground itself begins melting into pools of dust that grow larger every day. For what has demolished Venus, and now threatens Earth itself, is part machine, part life-form: a nano-virus, dubbed Moonseed, that attacks planets.

Four scientists are all that stand between Moonseed and Earth's extinction, four brilliant minds that must race to cut off the virus and save what's left of Earth--a pulse-stopping battle for discovery that will lead them from the Earth's inner core to a daredevil Moon voyage that could save, or damn, us all.

8,000 years ago Europe was a very different place. England was linked to Holland by a massive swathe of land. Where the North Sea is now lay the landmass of Northland. And then came a period of global warming, a shifting of continents and, over a few short years, the sea rushed in and our history was set. But what if the sea had been kept at bay?

Brythony is a young girl who lives in Northland. Like all her people she is a hunter gatherer, her simple tools fashioned from flint cutting edges lodged in wood and animal bone. When the sea first encroaches on her land her people simply move. Brythony moves further travelling to Asia. Where she sees mankind's first walled cities. And gets an idea. What if you could build a wall to keep the sea out? And so begins a colossal engineering project that will take decades, a wall that stretches for hundreds of miles, a wall that becomes an act of defiance, and containing the bones of the dead, an act of devotion. A wall that will change the geography of the world. And it's history.

Stephen Baxter has become expert at embedding human stories into the grandest sweeps of history and the most mind-blowing of concepts. STONE SPRING begins a trilogy that will tell the story of a changed world. It begins in 8,000 BC with an idea and ends in 1500 in a world that never saw the Roman Empire, Christianity or Islam. It is an eye-opening look at what history could so easily have been and an inspiring tale of how we control our future.

Centuries have passed. The wall that Ana's people built has long outlasted her and history has been changed. The British Isles are still one with the European mainland and Doggerland has become a vibrant and rich land.

So rich that it has drawn the attention of the Greeks. An invasion is mounted and soon Greek Biremes are grinding ashore on a coastline we never knew and the world will be changed for ever.

Stephen Baxter's new series catapults forward from pre-history into the ancient world and charts a new and wonderful story for our world. This is a superb example of Baxter's belief that anything is possible for mankind - even making a new world.

Many generations ago the Wall was first built to hold back the sea. Northland, a country of fertile plains and ancient forests rescued from the ocean, has become a thriving civilisation based on trade, technology and tradition, centred on the ancient home of the first builders, Etxelur. The whole of Europe, spanned by the Northlanders' steam caravan lines, has been changed in ways that could never have been predicted.

But nothing can last forever, not even the Wall. The weather is changing, growing colder, and in the wake of the long winters come famine, destruction and terror. And as whole nations are forced out of their lands and head for warmer climes, it seems that even Northland may not be able to endure.

But there is one man, an elderly scholar, who believes he can calculate why the world is cooling, and perhaps even salvage some scraps of the great civilisation of Etxelur. As he embarks on his grand quest across the world, as nations struggle for survival and the fires of war burn in the gloom, only one thing is certain.

The Ice is coming.

The Wheel. A ring of ice and steel around a moon of Saturn, and home to a mining colony supplying Earth. It's a bad place to grow up.

The colony has been plagued by problems and there are stories of mysterious creatures glimpsed aboard the Wheel. Many of the younger workers refuse to go down the warren-like mines anymore. And then young Phee Laws, surfing Saturn's rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction.

Aboard the Wheel, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find themselves caught in a mystery that goes right back to the creation of the solar system. A mystery that could kill them all.

The very far future: The Galaxy is a drifting wreck of black holes, neutron stars, chill white dwarfs. The age of star formation is long past. Yet there is life here, feeding off the energies of the stellar remnants, and there is mind, a tremendous Galaxy-spanning intelligence each of whose thoughts lasts a hundred thousand years. And this mind cradles memories of a long-gone age when a more compact universe was full of light...

The 27th century: Proxima Centauri, an undistinguished red dwarf star, is the nearest star to our sun - and (in this fiction), the nearest to host a world, Proxima IV, habitable by humans. But Proxima IV is unlike Earth in many ways. Huddling close to the warmth, orbiting in weeks, it keeps one face to its parent star at all times. The 'substellar point', with the star forever overhead, is a blasted desert, and the 'antistellar point' on the far side is under an ice cap in perpetual darkness. How would it be to live on such a world? Needle ships fall from Proxima IV's sky. Yuri Jones, with 1000 others, is about to find out...P ROXIMA tells the amazing tale of how we colonise a harsh new eden, and the secret we find there that will change our role in the Universe for ever.

The astonishing new SF novel from multi-award winning author Stephen Baxter - a dizzying exploration of alternate universes and deep time.

Fresh from his latest collaboration with Terry Pratchett on the Long Earth sequence Stephen Baxter now returns to the mysteries and challanges first hinted at in his acclaimed novel PROXIMA.

In PROXIMA we discovered ancient alien artifacts on the planet of Per Ardua - hatches that allowed us to step across light years of space as if we were stepping into another room. The universe opened up to us. Now in ULTIMA the consequences of this new freedom make themselves felt. And we discover that there are minds in the universe that are billions of years old and they have a plan for us. For some of us. But as we learn the true nature of the universe we also discover that we have countless pasts all meeting in this present and that our future is terrifyingly finite. It's time for us to fight to take back control.

This is grand scale, big idea SF of the best possible sort. It is set to build on the massive success of PROXIMA and define Stephen Baxter's work going forward.

This novella originally appeared in Science Fiction Age, May 1998. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (1999), edited by Gardner Dozois.

NORMALLY, WHEN THERE WAS NOTHING TO DO, HE LISTENED TO THE SILENCE.

The Silence was very faint here. Almost drowned out by the sounds of the mundane world. Did people in this polished building understand how noisy it was? The roar of air conditioners and computer fans, the susurration of many voices heard but not decipherable.... This was the office of the transEarth Institute, an arm of the Black Corporation. The faceless office, all plasterboard and chrome, was dominated by a huge logo, a chesspiece knight. This wasn't Joshua's world. None of it was his world. In fact, when you got right down to it, he didn't have a world; he had all of them.

ALL OF THE LONG EARTH.

A generation after the events of The Long Earth, humankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by "stepping." A new "America" - Valhalla - is emerging more than a million steps from Datum - our Earth. Thanks to a bountiful environment, the Valhallan society mirrors the core values and behaviors of colonial America. And Valhalla is growing restless under the controlling long arm of the Datum government.

Soon Joshua, now a married man, is summoned by Lobsang to deal with a building crisis that threatens to plunge the Long Earth into a war unlike any humankind has waged before.

2040-2045: In the years after the cataclysmic Yellowstone eruption there is massive economic dislocation as populations flee Datum Earth to myriad Long Earth worlds. Sally, Joshua, and Lobsang are all involved in this perilous work when, out of the blue, Sally is contacted by her long-vanished father and inventor of the original Stepper device, Willis Linsay. He tells her he is planning a fantastic voyage across the Long Mars and wants her to accompany him. But Sally soon learns that Willis has ulterior motives...

Meanwhile U. S. Navy Commander Maggie Kauffman has embarked on an incredible journey of her own, leading an expedition to the outer limits of the far Long Earth.

For Joshua, the crisis he faces is much closer to home. He becomes embroiled in the plight of the Next: the super-bright post-humans who are beginning to emerge from their 'long childhood' in the community called Happy Landings, located deep in the Long Earth. Ignorance and fear are causing 'normal' human society to turn against the Next - and a dramatic showdown seems inevitable...

2045-2059. Human society continues to evolve on Datum Earth, its battered and weary origin planet, as the spread of humanity progresses throughout the many Earths beyond.

Lobsang, now an elderly and complex AI, suffers a breakdown, and disguised as a human attempts to live a "normal" life on one of the millions of Long Earth worlds. His old friend, Joshua, now in his fifties, searches for his father and discovers a heretofore unknown family history. And the super-intelligent post-humans known as "the Next" continue to adapt to life among "lesser" humans.

But an alarming new challenge looms. An alien planet has somehow become "entangled" with one of the Long Earth worlds and, as Lobsang and Joshua learn, its voracious denizens intend to capture, conquer, and colonize the new universe - the Long Earth - they have inadvertently discovered.

The thrilling conclusion to the internationally bestselling Long Earth series explores the greatest question of all: What is the meaning of life?

2070-71. Nearly six decades after Step Day, a new society continues to evolve in the Long Earth. Now, a message has been received: "Join us."

The Next--the hyper-intelligent post-humans--realize that the missive contains instructions for kick-starting the development of an immense artificial intelligence known as The Machine. But to build this computer the size of an Earth continent, they must obtain help from the more populous and still industrious worlds of mankind.

Meanwhile, on a trek in the High Meggers, Joshua Valienté, now nearing seventy, is saved from death when a troll band discovers him. Living among the trolls as he recovers, Joshua develops a deeper understanding of this collective-intelligence species and its society. He discovers that some older trolls, with capacious memories, act as communal libraries, and live on a very strange Long Earth world, in caverns under the root systems of trees as tall as mountains.

Valienté also learns something much more profound... about life and its purpose in the Long Earth: We cultivate the cosmos to maximize the opportunities for life and joy in this universe, and to prepare for new universes to come.

This novelette originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, August 1994, and was reprinted in Clarkesworld Magazine, #83 August 2013. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twelth Annual Collection (1995), and The Good New Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition (1999), both edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Vacuum Diagrams (1997).

Read the full story for free at Clarkesworld.

This novelette originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2009. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Four, edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection Xeelee: Endurance (2015).

This short story originally appeared in Science Fiction Age, November 1995 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, March 2011. It can also be found in the anthologies Year's Best SF (1996), edited by David G. Hartwell, The Hard SF Renaissance (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, and Lightspeed: Year One (2011), edited by John Joseph Adams. The story is included in the collection Vacuum Diagrams (1997).

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #78 December 1993. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eleventh Annual Collection (1994) and Explorers: SF Adventures to Far Horizons (2000), both edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Vacuum Diagrams (1997).

This novella originally appeared in the anthology Godlike Machines (2010), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Eighth Annual Collection (2011), edited by Gardner Dozois. The story is included in the collection Xeelee: Endurance (2015).

This short story originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2006. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 12 (2007), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Xeelee: Endurance (2015).

Stephen Baxter's highly acclaimed first novel and the beginning of his stunning Xeelee Sequence. A spaceship from Earth accidentally crossed through a hole in space-time to a universe where the force of gravity is one billion times as strong as the gravity we know. Somehow the crew survived, aided by the fact that they emerged into a cloud of gas surrounding a black hole, which provided a breathable atmosphere. Five hundred years later, their descendants still struggle for existence, divided into two main groups. The Miners live on the Belt, a ramshackle ring of dwellings orbiting the core of a dead star, which they excavate for raw materials. These can be traded for food from the Raft, a structure built from the wreckage of the ship, on which a small group of scientists preserve the ancient knowledge which makes survival possible. Rees is a Miner whose curiosity about his world makes him stow away on a flying tree -- just one of the many strange local lifeforms -- carrying trade between the Belt and the Raft.

Accepted as an apprentice scientist, he learns that their world is dying, and that in order to live these survivors must contemplate a journey even more perilous and fantastic than that of their ancestors.

First there were good times: humankind reached glorious heights, even immortality. Then there were bad times: Earth was occupied by the faceless, brutal Qax. Immortality drugs were confiscated, the human spirit crushed. Earth became a vast factory for alien foodstuffs.

Into this new dark age appears the end of a tunnel through time. Made from exotic matter, it is humanity's greatest engineering project in the pre-Qax era, where the other end of the tunnel remains anchored near Jupiter. When a small group of humans in a makeshift craft outwit the Qax to escape to the past through the tunnel, it is not to warn the people of Earth against the Qax, who are sure to follow them. For these men and women from the future are themselves dangerous fanatics in pursuit of their own bizarre quantum grail.

Michael Poole, architect of the tunnel, must boldly confront the consequences of his genius.

Timelike Infinity: the strange region at the end of time where the Xeelee, owners of the universe, are waiting...

Star Humans are microscopic, but their hopes and fears, and loves, are not. And the future of humans everywhere, on Earth and among the stars, depends on their courage in the face of attack by the mighty Xeelee, owners of the Universe.

A novel of the Xeelee Sequence from the acknowledged heir to the visionary legacy of Clarke and Wells, heralding a new Golden Age in science fiction.

Michael Poole's wormholes constructed in the orbit of Jupiter had opened the galaxy to humankind. Then Poole tried looping a wormhole back on itself, tying a knot in space and ripping a hole in time.

It worked. Too well.

Poole was never seen again. Then from far in the future, from a time so distant that the stars themselves were dying embers, came an urgent SOS--and a promise. The universe was doomed, but humankind was not. Poole had stumbled upon an immense artifact, light-years across, fabricated from the very string of the cosmos.

The universe had a door. And it was open...

While the human race struggles against alien oppressors, an even greater epic battle rages between the deadly dark-matter photino birds and their implacable enemy, the Xeelee...

Return to the eon-spanning and universe-crossing conflict between humanity and the unknowable alien Xeelee in this selection of uncollected and unpublished stories, newly edited and placed in chronological reading order.

From tales charting the earliest days of man's adventure to the stars to stories of Old Earth, four billion years in the future, the range and startling imagination of Baxter is always on display. As humanity rises and falls, ebbs and flows, one thing is always needed - the ability to endure.

Contains eleven short stories and novellas.

Half a million years in the future, on a dead, war-ravaged world at the centre of the Galaxy, there is a mile-high statue of Michael Poole.

Poole, born on Earth in the fourth millennium, was one of mankind's most influential heroes. He was not a warrior, not an emperor. He was an engineer, a builder of wormhole transit systems. But Poole's work would ultimately lead to a vast and destructive conflict, a million-year war between humanity and the enigmatic, powerful aliens known as the Xeelee.

The Xeelee won, but at a huge cost. And, defeated in a greater war, the Xeelee eventually fled the universe. Most of them.

A handful were left behind, equipped with time travel capabilities, their task to tidy up: to reorder history more to the Xeelee's liking. That million-year war with humankind was one blemish. It had to be erased. And in order to do that, a lone Xeelee was sent back in time to remove Michael Poole from history...

Michael Poole finds himself in a very strange landscape...

This is the centre of the Galaxy. And in a history without war with the humans, the Xeelee have had time to built an immense structure here. The Xeelee Belt has a radius ten thousand times Earth's orbital distance. It is a light year in circumference. If it was set in the solar system it would be out in the Oort Cloud, among the comets - but circling the sun. If it was at rest it would have a surface area equivalent to about thirty billion Earths. But it is not at rest: it rotates at near lightspeed. And because of relativistic effects, distances are compressed for inhabitants of the Belt, and time drastically slowed.

The purpose of the Belt is to preserve a community of Xeelee into the very far future, when they will be able to tap dark energy, a universe-spanning antigravity field, for their own purposes. But with time the Belt has attracted populations of lesser species, here for the immense surface area, the unending energy flows. Poole, Miriam and their party, having followed the Ghosts, must explore the artefact and survive encounters with its strange inhabitants - before Poole, at last, finds the Xeelee who led the destruction of Earth...

For eons, Earth has been under observation by the Firstborn, beings almost as old as the universe itself. The Firstborn are unknown to humankind -- until they act. In an instant, Earth is carved up and reassembled like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Suddenly the planet and every living thing on it no longer exist in a single timeline. Instead, the world becomes a patchwork of eras, from prehistory to 2037, each with its own indigenous inhabitants.

Scattered across the planet are floating silver orbs impervious to all weapons and impossible to communicate with. Are these technologically advanced devices responsible for creating and sustaining the rifts in time? Are they cameras through which inscrutable alien eyes are watching? Or are they something stranger and more terrifying still?

The answer may lie in the ancient city of Babylon, where two groups of refugees from 2037 -- three cosmonauts returning to Earth from the International Space Station, and three United Nations peacekeepers on a mission in Afghanistan -- have detected radio signals: the only such signals on the planet, apart from their own. The peacekeepers find allies in nineteenth-century British troops and in the armies of Alexander the Great. The astronauts, crash-landed in the steppes of Asia, join forces with the Mongol horde led by Genghis Khan. The two sides set out for Babylon, each determined to win the race for knowledge... and the power that lies within.

Yet the real power is beyond human control, perhaps even human understanding. As two great armies face off before the gates of Babylon, it watches, waiting....

Returned to the Earth of 2037 by the Firstborn, mysterious beings of almost limitless technological prowess, Bisesa Dutt is haunted by the memories of her five years spent on the strange alternate Earth called Mir, a jigsaw-puzzle world made up of lands and people cut out of different eras of Earth's history. Why did the Firstborn create Mir? Why was Bisesa taken there and then brought back on the day after her original disappearance?

Bisesa's questions receive a chilling answer when scientists discover an anomaly in the sun's core--an anomaly that has no natural cause is evidence of alien intervention over two thousand years before. Now plans set in motion millennia ago by inscrutable watchers light-years away are coming to fruition in a sunstorm designed to scour the Earth of all life in a bombardment of deadly radiation.

Thus commences a furious race against a ticking solar time bomb. But even now, as apocalypse looms, cooperation is not easy for the peoples and nations of the Earth. Religious and political differences threaten to undermine every effort.

And all the while, the Firstborn are watching...

The Firstborn -- the mysterious race of aliens who first became known to science fiction fans as the builders of the iconic black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey -- have inhabited legendary master of science fiction Sir Arthur C. Clarke's writing for decades. With Time's Eye and Sunstorm, the first two books in their acclaimed Time Odyssey series, Clarke and his brilliant co-author Stephen Baxter imagined a near-future in which the Firstborn seek to stop the advance of human civilization by employing a technology indistinguishable from magic.

Their first act was the Discontinuity, in which Earth was carved into sections from different eras of history, restitched into a patchwork world, and renamed Mir. Mir's inhabitants included such notables as Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and United Nations peacekeeper Bisesa Dutt. For reasons unknown to her, Bisesa entered into communication with an alien artifact of inscrutable purpose and godlike power--a power that eventually returned her to Earth. There, she played an instrumental role in humanity's race against time to stop a doomsday event: a massive solar storm triggered by the alien Firstborn designed to eradicate all life from the planet. That fate was averted at an inconceivable price. Now, twenty-seven years later, the Firstborn are back.

This time, they are pulling no punches: They have sent a "quantum bomb." Speeding toward Earth, it is a device that human scientists can barely comprehend, that cannot be stopped or destroyed--and one that will obliterate Earth.

Bisesa's desperate quest for answers sends her first to Mars and then to Mir, which is itself threatened with extinction. The end seems inevitable. But as shocking new insights emerge into the nature of the Firstborn and their chilling plans for mankind, an unexpected ally appears from light-years away.

Inscribed in Latin, The Prophecy has resided in the hands of a single family for generations, revealing secrets about the world that is to come, and guiding them to wealth and power...

It begins when a Celtic noble betrays his people at the behest of his mother's belief in The Prophecy and sides with the conquering Roman legions. For the next 400 years, Britannia thrives-as does the family that contributed to Rome's reign over the island with the construction of Emperor Hadrian's Wall and the protection of Emperor Constantine from a coup d'tat.

And even when the sun begins to set on the Roman Empire, The Prophecy remains. For those capable of deciphering its signs and portents, the future of Earth is in their hands.

Three centuries have passed since Rome fell, as The Prophecy foretold. Now The Prophecy's scroll is in the hands of a young girl, the last surviving member of the family who received The Prophecy. She lives in tranquility, disguisd as a boy among the monks on the isle of Lindisfarne-until the Vikings come, deliberately destroying the final copies of the scroll. But it remains in her memory, and when William of Normandy, who history will call the Conqueror, rises to power, once more the fate of the land rests on actions inspired by those age-old words.

But as time passes, memory of The Prophecy dims--and the veiled girl struggles to understand her heritage before all knowledge of the future will be lost to the past.

As William the Conqueror's men attempt to stamp out the flames of rebellion, a prophecy is uttered. A bedraggled woman in a ruined chapel speaks of civilizations in conflict, armed by the engines of God...

And that prophecy proves to be true as the fearsome war between Christianity and Islam leaves its mark across the land. In Spain, a rogue priest dreams of the final defeat of Islam, for he has found a rent in the tapestry of time, a point where agents from the future used diabolical weapons of destruction to change history. Centuries later, in 1492, as men of vision weary of the strife and are drawn to the unknown West, one such explorer seeks the funding for his voyage- while a mysterious Weaver plots to unravel the strands of time and stop him.

The Weaver of Time's Tapestry has finally suceeded in twisting the threads of history into a new shape; the Luftwaffe have pushed the RAF to the brink, and the invasion barges have reached the beaches of Sussex and Kent. Britain wakes up to the nightmare of the Wermacht unleashed in Southern England. As the desperate battle to hold up the invasion rages it is left to a few indivuals caught up in the panic and chaos to piece together what has really happened - is this the culmination of a plan that has taken centuries to play out, a plot from the future to change the past forever?

There is a secret passage through time

...and it leads all the way to the end of Eternity. But the journey has a terrible cost. It alters not only the future but the "present" in which we live.

A century after the publication of H. G. Wells' immortal The Time Machine, Stephen Baxter, today's most acclaimed new "hard SF" author, returns to the distant conflict between the Eloi and the Morlocks in a story that is at once an exciting expansion, and a radical departure based on the astonishing new understandings of quantum physics.

It has been 14 years since the Martians invaded England. The world has moved on, always watching the skies but content that we know how to defeat the Martian menace. Machinery looted from the abandoned capsules and war-machines has led to technological leaps forward. The Martians are vulnerable to earth germs. The Army is prepared.

So when the signs of launches on Mars are seen, there seems little reason to worry. Unless you listen to one man, Walter Jenkins, the narrator of Wells' book. He is sure that the Martians have learned, adapted, understood their defeat.

He is right.

Thrust into the chaos of a new invasion, a journalist - sister-in-law to Walter Jenkins - must survive, escape and report on the war.

The Massacre of Mankind has begun.

A sequel to The War of the Worlds authorized by the H. G. Wells Estate.

Hundreds of years in the future, on a stagnating and almost empty Earth, a space shuttle pilot from the early days of the 21st century is awoken from the cryogenic sleep he entered after a devastating accident. As he comes to terms with this new world, he begins to realise that their history does not match what he remembers - and that only he may be able to stop the coming catastrophe destined to destroy the planet. Until he meets a young woman who seems to have a drive of her own, and a plan...

Trapped on an alternate Earth, the combined crews of a crashed Russian spaceship, a British expeditionary force and a group of strays from the future must work together to survive, escape, and discover what led them to this point. All are from parallel universes where small changes in history led to different realities, and the tensions between the groups are rising.

But some changes were not small. The solar system has been altered, changed, shaped in the various realities, and the World Engineers - unspeakably powerful, completely unknown - are still active. Why have they populated this planet with humanity's ancestors and dinosaurs? What is on the moon of Saturn that gives off such an odd light? And even if they can be found, can they be stopped - and should they be?

Malenfant, Deidra and the rest of their party must find a way off the planet, back into space, and into the many dimensions seeking the answer...

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Constellations: The Best of New British SF, edited by Peter Crowther. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 11 (2005), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Resplendent (2006).

The sixth millennium: An alien occupation of Earth has been thrown off. Now a ferocious new government called the Coalition is sweeping through the solar system, seeking out those who collaborated with the hated enemy. A handful of immortals, once collaborators, live on an ice moon called Port Sol, far from the sun. They govern a community of thousands of short-lived adherents. The Coalition's grasp will soon reach this remote place. The immortals must flee the solar system on vast starships - but they can take with them only a few of their followers.

A young man called Rusel must choose between his lover, and his life; he chooses to flee. But Rusel faces a long journey, a journey that will last tens of millennia before the great ships reach their destination. Generations will live out their lives knowing nothing but the journey. Rusel agrees to accept an immortality of his own, to guide the ship and its evanescent crew across this desert of time. But as the years stretch to centuries and to millennia, the origins of the journey are lost in legend - and then the cruel scalpel of evolution begins to work on the crew. And Rusel lies on and on.

This novella can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Best Short Novels: 2005, edited by Jonathan Strahan. It is included in the collection Resplendent (2006).

Hugo Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, July 2001. The story is included in the collection Resplendent (2006).

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, March 2003. It can also be found in het Year's Best SF 9 (2004) and The Space Opera Renaissance (2006), both edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Resplendent (2006).

George Poole isn't sure whether his life has reached a turning point or a dead end. At forty-five, he is divorced and childless, with a career that is going nowhere fast. Then, when his father dies suddenly, George stumbles onto a family secret: a sister he never knew existed. A twin named Rosa, raised in Rome by an enigmatic cult. Hoping to find the answers to the missing pieces of his life, George sets out for the ancient city.

Once in Rome, he learns from Rosa the enthralling story of their distant ancestor, Regina, an iron-willed genius determined to preserve her family as the empire disintegrates around her. It was Regina who founded the cult, which has mysteriously survived and prospered below the streets of Rome for almost two millennia. The Order, says Rosa, is her real family and, even if he doesn't realize it yet, it is George's family, too. When she takes him into the vast underground city that is the Order's secret home, he feels a strong sense of belonging, yet there is something oddly disturbing about the women he meets. They are all so young and so very much alike.

Stephen Baxter possesses one of the most brilliant minds in modern science fiction. His vivid storytelling skills have earned him comparison to the giants of the past: Clarke, Asimov, Stapledon. Like his great predecessors, Baxter thinks on a cosmic scale, spinning cutting-edge scientific speculation into pure, page-turning gold. Now Baxter is back with a breathtaking adventure that begins during the catastrophic collapse of Roman Britain and stretches forward into an unimaginably distant, war-torn future, where the fate of humanity lies waiting at the center of the galaxy....

For more than twenty thousand years, humans have been at war with the alien race of Xeelee. It is a war fought with armaments so advanced as to be godlike, a war in which time itself has become an ever-shifting battleground. At the cost of billions of lives, and with ruthless and relentless efficiency, the ruling Coalition has pushed the Xeelee back to the galactic core, where the supermassive black hole known as Chandra serves the Xeelee as both fortress and power source.

There, along a front millions of light-years long, a grisly stalemate reigns, until a young pilot, Pirius, faced with certain death, disobeys orders and employs an innovative time-travel maneuver that, for the first time in the history of the war, results in the capture of a Xeelee fighter. But far from being hailed as a hero when he returns to base with his prize, Pirius is court-martialed, disgraced, and sentenced to penal servitude on a bleak asteroid.

It is not only Pirius who pays the price. In flying into the future and back again, Pirius returned to a time before he’d left, a time inhabited by his younger self. And that younger self, by the pitiless logic of Coalition justice, shares the older Pirius guilt and must be punished. Not everyone in the Coalition agrees. Commissary Nilis believes that the elder Pirius, whom he dubs Pirius Blue, may have found a way to defeat the Xeelee. But Nilis can do nothing for Pirius Blue. Instead, he takes charge of the younger Pirius (Pirius Red), and brings him back to Earth, the capital of a vast empire seething with intrigue.

There Pirius Red will discover truths that will shatter his preconceived notions of all that he is fighting for, even of what it means to be human. Pirius Blue, meanwhile, will learn truths harsher and more discomfiting still. Yet the most shocking revelation of all is still to come, waiting for them at a place called Chandra....

It is the year 2047, and nuclear engineer Michael Poole is still in the throes of grief. His beloved wife, Morag, died seventeen years ago, along with their second child. Yet Michael is haunted by more than just the memory of Morag. On a beach in Miami, he sees his dead wife. But she vanishes as suddenly as she appears, leaving no clue as to her mysterious purpose.

Alia was born on a starship, fifteen thousand light years from Earth, five hundred thousand years after the death of Michael Poole. Yet she knows him intimately. In this distant future, when humanity has diversified as a species and spread across the galaxy, every person is entrusted with the duty of Witnessing the life of one man, woman, or child from the past, recovered by means of a technology able to traverse time itself. Alia's subject is Michael Poole.

When his surviving, estranged son is injured, Michael tries to reconnect with him–and to stave off a looming catastrophe. Vast reservoirs of toxic gases lie buried beneath the poles, trapped in crystals of ice. Now that ice is melting. Once it goes, the poisons released will threaten all life on Earth. A bold solution is within reach, if only Michael can convince a doubting world. Yet as Morag's ghostly visitations continue, Michael begins to doubt his own sanity.

In the future, Alia is chosen to become a Transcendent, an undying member of the group mind that is shepherding humanity toward an evolutionary apotheosis. The Witnessings are an integral part of their design, for only by redeeming the pain of every human who has lived and died can true Transcendence be achieved. Yet Alia discovers a dark side to the Transcendents' plans, a vein of madness that may lead to an unthinkable renunciation.

Somehow, Michael Poole holds the fate of the future in his hands. Now, to save that future, Alia must undertake a desperate journey into the past....

Resplendent is a collection of stories that encompasses mankind's epic fight for survival against the Xeelee, a narrative of how man will change and evolve over our epic journey out into the universe. These tales will encompass the rise of sub-molecular empires in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang to mankind's final transformation. Full of cutting-edge science, descriptions of time and space on a mind-boggling scale and memorable, all-too-human characters. It is both the capstone to one of the most significant series in the history of SF and a remarkable achievement in its own right. This is a mature and uniquely talented writer at the height of his powers.

Table of Contents:

• Cadre Siblings - (2000)
• Conurbation 2473 - (2003)
• Reality Dust - (2000)
• All in a Blaze - (2003)
• Silver Ghost - (2000)
• The Cold Sink - (2001)
• On the Orion Line - (2000)
• Ghost Wars - (2006)
• The Ghost Pit - (2001)
• Lakes of Light - (2005)
• Breeding Ground - (2003)
• The Dreaming Mould - (2002)
• The Great Game - (2003)
• The Chop Line - (2003)
• In the Un-Black - (2001)
• Riding the Rock - (2002)
• Mayflower II - (2004)
• Between Worlds - (2004)
• The Siege of Earth - (2006)