The project, towed by the spaceship Cauchy, returns a wormhole gate, appearing to offer time travel due to the time 'difference' between the exits of the wormhole (relativistic time dilation), with one end having remained in the Solar System and the other travelling at near lightspeed for a century. Ī human-built device, the Interface project, returns to the Solar System after 1,500 years. Humans have encountered a few other races, including the astoundingly advanced Xeelee, and been conquered once before – by the Squeem – but successfully recovered. Set thousands of years in the future ( AD 5407), the human race has been conquered by the Qax, a truly alien turbulent-liquid form of life, who now rule over the few star systems of human space – adopting processes from human history to effectively oppress the resentful race. It largely sets the stage for the magnum opus of the Xeelee Sequence, Ring (as opposed to Vacuum Diagrams, Flux, or Raft, which concern themselves with side stories). The second book in the Xeelee Sequence, Timelike Infinity introduces a universe of powerful alien species and technologies that manages to maintain a realistic edge because of Baxter's physics background. Michael Poole, architect of the tunnel, must boldly confront the consequences of his genius.Timelike Infinity is a 1992 science fiction book by British author Stephen Baxter. For these men and women from the future are themselves dangerous fanatics in pursuit of their own bizarre quantum grail. 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. 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. Into this new dark age appears the end of a tunnel through time. Earth became a vast factory for alien foodstuffs. Immortality drugs were confiscated, the human spirit crushed. Then there were bad times: Earth was occupied by the faceless, brutal Qax. The second novel in Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence.įirst there were good times: humankind reached glorious heights, even immortality. Timelike Infinity: the strange region at the end of time where the Xeelee, owners of the universe, are waiting.
0 kommentar(er)
