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Read Exultant (2005)

Exultant (2005)

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Rating
3.8 of 5 Votes: 3
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ISBN
0345457897 (ISBN13: 9780345457899)
Language
English
Publisher
del rey

Exultant (2005) - Plot & Excerpts

Time travel paradox bifurcate the hero's journey.Baxter has a head full of great concepts, and not all seem to make it to the page intact. The war between human and the mysterious Xeelee introduces a lot of wild concepts (most familiar among them the idea of war as Malthusian population control), but when we meet the bureaucrats on Earth who command the war effort these ideas teeter on the brink of clumsy satire; when the younger Pirius is granted an audience with one such bureaucrat, the man behind the curtain is hugely fat and constantly fed by a couple of attendants.Baxter later seems to lose interest in the war drama in favor of telling a weird and wild history of the universe, in which life proliferates everywhere: in the soup of quarks congealing out of the Big Bang, in the heart of suns, in curvatures of space-time. He takes his impressive knowledge of theoretical physics and, rather than hewing in the safe territory "hard scifi" authors tend to favor, goes out on a limb, confronting the limits of our knowledge, risking the occasional implausibility in order to make some points. I get the feeling that this is a stage in his Xeelee Sequence when these implausibilities have begun to crop up; the far-future technology used by humans in the book was reverse-engineered from artifacts of far more advanced aliens, and often seems indistinguishable from magic. Sometimes we see that Baxter is making a point therein, but occasionally I felt he was pandering, making an excuse to give his soldiers some wicked-sounding zap guns ("Starbreakers!" I imagine him crying after brainstorming a good thirty minutes at the ol word processor. "The proles will eat that shit up.").There is a disappointing familiarity to the ending, too. I don't think I'm being too spoilery if I say that there is a big space-battle and that in the end the heroes save the day. Baxter is giving us original ideas and original, mind-bending settings in his stories, and can it be too much to expect that he use these tools to create original stories? I don't think so, and I suspect that if I find the right Baxter book, he will deliver.

This was definitely an interesting read, especially me being someone who is not only a science fiction fan but also a quantum physics fan. This books utilizes many current theories of quantum physics, and even builds a few of its own, and paints a universe more colorful and full of diversity than I had ever imagined. The story is long, so if you're looking for an action-packed experience, this isn't for you. The story seems unnecessarily convoluted, and drags on in many cases, leaving the reader to wonder how everything connects, and if it would really matter all that much if he or she skipped around a bit. But if you are patient and read through these slow moments, you are repaid in the end. All the major threads wrap up nicely at the end of the book, but after it's all over, I was still left with a few unanswered questions. Dull storyline aside, the science lessons embedded in this book makes me feel like I've just taken an introductory course in theoretical physics. It was a mind-expanding experience, and makes me want to dust off my science books and crack them open again. This book--as well as others in this series, is recommended for fans of hard science fiction. It's reminiscent of the work of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Ben Bova, and to a lesser extent, Frederick Pohl. If you enjoyed their books, you'll enjoy this one.

What do You think about Exultant (2005)?

Exultant is the 2nd in the 4 part "Destiny's Children" series. I found it superior to the story told in part 1. Baxter does not write what I would call classic sci-fi. He writes like the good and capable story teller that he is; creating wide-sweeping and complex scenarios that generally sustain a readers' attention. This story is set far, far in the future; in the 3rd expansion of human-kind into the universe. There is much sort of technical detail in this story that doesn't really work for me, which I tend to scan quickly as it seems to add little whether I "get it" or not. Still the story was decent and well paced. Not sure if I will continue with parts 3 and 4 anytime soon though. Perhaps in a review that point is the most telling!
—Peter Walton-Jones

I would definitely call Stephen Baxter's Exultant an interesting book, but I would be hard-pressed to recommend it to anyone. It has some very exciting SF concepts, but they are buried in a plot that makes so litle sense and dialog that will make you cringe.Baxter is a man of ideas, but it seems he is too busy pondering grand concepts to put them in the proper context of a good story. There are truly mind-boggling concepts; even too many, it seems, because some have barely a page or two of development. The most extreme was 'Concept space', a mind-boggling concept which is used merely to provide a deus ex machina solution to the protagonists.If at least the hard SF was solid enough despite the weak plot... As it happens, some concepts are hastily thrown together, then conveniently circumvented when they are no longer required. The whole "FTL Foreknowledge" concept, for instance, at the heart of the story, can be waived by the author when he needs the protagonists to fool the Xeelee. Their solution? Use the time-honored but 'risky' 'anti-Tolman manoeuver', which is never explained nor used again. Sigh.Another pet peeve I simply cannot let pass: Commissary Nilis. Nowhere is this guy made sympathetic, with his bumbling attitude, his obvious lack of oratory skills, his habit of walking barefoot everywhere and his smelly feet and armpits(!) Yet he is seen more often than any of the main characters, because he can send Virtuals of himself to annoy all of them at every corner of the Galaxy at the same time. Whenever he let slip a 'My eyes!', I was ready to gouge my own out of their sockets.If you're wondering whether to pick up this book because it is the sequel to 'Coalescent', then don't. Only passing references are made to Coalescent, and the difference in quality between the two books is such that it seems Exultant was written by a 13 year-old who got excited at reading Coalescent.If you must read a Stephen Baxter book, there are much better ones than this one. Coalescent and Manifold:Time are both excellent Baxter novels. This one is not.
—Daniel Roy

A sequel of sorts to Coalescent, this is the story of a millennia long war in the far distant future between an almost Spartan human civilisation & a race of aliens that exist outside the substance of our universe. In simpler terms it deals with a pilot named Pirius & how his potential to change the course of the Galaxy's history. So clearly Baxter felt Coalescent wasn't traditionally sci fi enough & decided to make up for that this time around. I won't even pretend to know anything about quantum physics so I cant speak to the accuracy of how it's depicted here but there is a lot of it. The sheer amount of prose dedicated to science terminology is a little overwhelming, but I found I was able to get the gist of things more often than not. Despite this the book isn't completely dry, there's a well developed character interaction & action (it's also quite a solid science fiction war story) & the plot is well paced. Despite the occasional word dump of physics jargon it's still very readable (once again I say that as someone whose knowledge of that whole area is limited at best) & an original vision of the future that incorporates novel concepts about the origins of the universe.
—Shane Kiely

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