Editing Xeelee Sequence (section)

==Plot in a Nutshell==
[[File:D8pnzvk-f1122a2a-0f2e-4853-9beb-5806147475bc.jpg|350px|right|thumb|And you thought the [[Old Ones]] were ancient. Credits to [https://www.deviantart.com/frogisis/art/Prehistory-526839392 Frogisis].]]
{{Topquote|And everywhere the humans went they found life...|The good news is extraterrestrials life does exist and the bad news is...well everything shown in [[Star Trek]] was [[Bullshit|BS]] from Vacuum Diagrams.}}
{{Topquote|That’s the trouble with happy endings. You just live on and on, until you’ve sucked all the juice out, and it turns out not to be so happy after all.|The ending is just the beginning repeating and it will only get much worse from Transcendent.}}
{{topquote|To the [[Old Ones|Xeelee]], we were little more than [[Skaven|rats]] — so that's what we became. Tenacious, relentless, swarming; fighting an [[Long War|interstellar war]] with teeth and nails.|A basic summary of how grimdark society in the ICoG is from Exultant}}

To make things short and easy, the entirety of the Xeelee Sequence is centered around the cosmic war between the Xeelee, the masters of 'baryonic' matter (AKA normal matter for us non-scientist plebeians), and the Photino [[Tzeentch|Bird]]s, the masters of dark matter. The war stretched through the entire timeline, from the split microseconds of the Big Bang to the heat death of the entire universe. The war started because the Photino Birds, creatures made from dark matter, wanted to make their home a little bit comfier, and in order to do this they decide to unintentionally [[Grimdark|exterminate all Baryonic lifeforms in the entirety of the universe by reducing all the stars into white dwarfs via accelerated cosmic heat death.]] The Xeelee understandably did not like the idea of some home invader trying to do a home deco around their turf and the battle begin. Yes, you hear us right, the entire war was due to the Photino Birds, for all intents and purposes, searching for a comfier home to live in. Essentially, the war stretched throughout all of time, since almost every major race in the Xeelee Sequence has weaponized Time Travel, and since Stephen Baxter <u>'''KNOWS'''</u> his science better than most sci-fi authors, FTL travel has significant effects on time dilation. Granted, his work relied a lot on speculative physics; for example, The Great Attractor has proven to be much less massive than what was thought when the novel was written and has an even larger mass concentration behind it.

But what about us [[human]]s? We got our asses kicked by two alien races; the Squeem and Qax, and the latter of the two was so traumatic that it turned humanity into one of the most xenocidal forces in all of science-fiction. Seriously, the [[Imperium of Man]] has nothing compared to these assholes, and no chapter in human history was so downright depressing and fucked up as Qax occupation. Humanity has reached the point that it wants to force the one Xeelee inhabiting the Milky Way to GTFO because they thought the giant Cosmic Ring that the Xeelee was making was a weapon designed to destroy humanity ([[Derp|when in reality the Ring was made by the Xeelee to save ''ALL'' Baryonic lifeforms, including humans, and bring them a new Universe]]). This understandably annoyed the shit out of the Xeelee, so they decided to leave the galaxy. And what did humanity do after the Xeelee left? [[Horus Heresy|It collapsed into a wide-scale civil war before being unified by another tyrannical regime,]] [[Age of Strife| and then humanity evolved into different species and fought each other in the period known as the Bifurcation, some humans losing their consciousness in the process of evolution.]] In the following millions of years, the descendants of humans have annoyed the Xeelee to the point that they got fed up with our shit and decided to lock the entire Sol System in a fourth-dimensional prison [[Grimdark|while leaving pretty much 99% of humanity to die off.]] The only humans who are actually doing OK (sort of) are the passengers of the Great Northern, a generation ship that predated all the asshole empires, wound up stuck five million years in the future, and promptly made a beeline for Xeelee-controlled space to hide.

Unfortunately for the Xeelee, dark matter outnumbers and outmasses baryonic matter 9-to-1, meaning that the war was long-decided eons ago. Desperate, the Xeelee decide to create the aforementioned Cosmic Ring to open a gateway to a new universe to escape to. The Photino Birds find this giant Cosmic Ring to be a threat and decide to destroy it, and almost succeed - but in the end, the remaining Xeelee, humans, and other baryonic lifeforms managed to escape into the new universe, leaving the old Universe to be conquered by the Photino Birds. [[Grimdark|Those unfortunate chaps who missed their chance would die a slow and painful death as their universe becomes unfit to uphold baryonic life.]]

What Baxter should be commended on is the fact that his aliens are truly ''alien'' in every sense of the word. None of them are even remotely humanoid and almost all of them (barring the Silver Ghosts) do not think like a human; with the majority of them bearing chemistry so fucking bizarre it borderlines on theoretical physics for some of them. Another thing he should be given plenty of credit for is that Baxter also understands a thing or two about ''scale''. The vast, ''vast'' majority of Sci-Fi works have no understanding of what scale is, making their respective universe feel too small or too big. [[Warhammer 40,000]], [[Star Wars]], [[Star Trek]], [[Halo]], among countless others are all guilty of this. However, because the Sequence is a setting-driven story rather than a ''character-driven'' one, Baxter manages to showcase just how motherfucking ECKBAWKS HUEG the Sequence is. It is truly fucking mindboggling ''yet'', grounded in reality due to his application, knowledge, and respect for physics.

===Raft===
The first book in the Sequence, and something of an oddball. It follows the story of a boy named Rees, living on a mining platform in another universe where gravity is far stronger as he explores the nebula he lives in and sees the society fall apart around him. Unlike any of the other books, it contains very little reference to the rest of the Sequence, and is best thought of as a side story.

===Timelike Infinity===
Timelike Infinity deals with the events of the Qax occupation, as well as a certain Michael Poole. The story is responsible for setting up many events to come for the rest of the Sequence, and at one point features [[Wat|Stonehenge being flown as a spaceship.]]

===Flux===
Follows primitive posthumans living on a neutron star coming to terms with society. As the story progresses, the neutron star is revealed to be a cruise missile shot by far-future humans, with the posthuman race being created to ensure the the star stays on course. The neutron star's posthumans, however, rebelled, and redirected the star's course. Similarly to Raft, it is largely unrelated to the major events of the Sequence.

===Vacuum Diagrams===
A collection of short stories spanning the length of the entire Sequence, and easily the least [[Grimdark]] book in the Sequence. 

===Destiny Children series===
Explores Earth and humankind throughout various ages, with the 2nd book Exultant shedding light onto the notorious Interim Coalition. Probably the most Grimdark series in the Sequence.

====Coalescent====
Set in the modern day, it follows an exhausted office worker by the name of George Poole (Yes, like Michael Poole) as he searches for a long-lost sister of his, only to stumble upon an ancient "hive" of people living underneath Italy. Meanwhile, a girl living within said hive struggles with coming of age and what that means in a society where no one even comes of age, and the story occasionally cuts back to the days of the Roman Empire to explore how the hive came to be.

===Exultant===
Set during the height of the Interim Coalition’s war with the Xeelee, Exultant follows a pilot named Pirius who gets [[Grimdark|court-martialed for a crime he hasn’t committed yet]], and is split into his past and present versions: Past Pirius goes on to spearhead a project whose goal is to ultimately defeat the Xeelee, while present Pirius is sent to the frontlines. 

===Transcendent===
Transcendent’s story is twofold: Michael Poole (No, not that one) is living in the year 2047 trying to solve climate change, while his every move is watched by an ape-like posthuman grappling with trying to understand the Transcendence.

===Resplendent===
A collection of short stories like Vacuum Diagrams spanning the Qax Occupation until humanity’s final defeat at the hands of the Xeelee. Sheds light onto the Silver Ghosts and the Qax Extirpation, as well as giving a better look into the utter horrors of the Coalition.