Thursday, July 28, 2005

Finished _Ring_


I didn't realize when I picked up the book that it was an epilogue of sorts for the Xeelee Sequence. It wasn't clear that it was such until the author's comments at the end of the book. Not being that familiar with Baxter's work, I didn't realize that there was a world he'd been building in a lot. even so, the book did stand on its own.

The book is primarily about Lieserl - an artificially aged and uploaded woman - and the Great Northern, a haven ship that is supposed to go to the far future by means of relativistic time dilation to find out why the sun is being killed. Lieserl acts as something of an observer of humanity's rise, fall, and escape of fate. The characters from the Great Northern escape at the end of the baryonic universe to another one.

The whole plot of Lieserl was disturbing to me as a new father. I really didn't like it much, esp at first. I found the character interesting. What was done to her was monstrous. It was far, far worse than most things that I have encountered in SF for an individual.

I have to say that Baxter really doesn't like a happy ending based on the sampling that I have read so far. In Evolution he has mankind devolving,losing sentience, and shows the final, actual extinction. In Ring he has them get wiped out (except for the Great Northern) by the Xeelee and even then the survival of humanity in the new universe it flees to is in question.

I also get the feeling that Baxter doesn't like his species too much either. He has humanity, rather than muddle through its problems as is standard procedure for our species, always make things worse. Humanity is what destroys itself in Evolution (helped by the volcanic activity, of course, but supposedly a nasty war helped it along) and in Ring he labels humanity as fundamentally insane. This is something of a reaction, I assume, to the human exceptionalism that runs through SF, but, erm, damn, dude...

I have to admit that I like both the human exceptionalisma nd the bitter sweet endings that some SFnal authors have done, but...IDK. Baxter might get another outing. He might not. I ahve to say I am rather underwhelmed by anything other than his audacity. I hope he's not one of the bright stars of the UK SFnal Revolution I keep hearing about.


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