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Exultant (Destiny's Children) | 
| Author: Stephen Baxter
Publisher: Del Rey
Category: Book
List Price: $7.50
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Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 389992
Media: Mass Market Paperback
Pages: 512
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 6.8 x 3.9 x 1.2
ISBN: 0345457897
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780345457899
ASIN: 0345457897
Publication Date: October 25, 2005
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Product Description
When it comes to cutting-edge science fiction, Stephen Baxter is in a league of his own. His mastery of hard science, his fearlessly speculative imagination, and his ability to combine grand philosophical questions with tales of rousing adventure make him essential reading for anyone concerned with the future of humankind. Now, in Exultant, Baxter takes us to a distant future of dazzling promise and deadly threat, in which a far-flung humanity battles for survival against an implacable alien foe.
Destiny’s Children
EXULTANT
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. . . .
From the Hardcover edition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 an engrossing read February 27, 2008
Akira Touya (Berlin)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
this book sort of seems like the odd one out when compared to the other novels in the destiny's children series (coalescent and transcendent are more like each other), but i really do like this one the most. although it is part of a series, i would say it is a stand-alone novel. it is more in continuation of the xeelee sequence than the others (even resplendent only contributes a little). jeez it just makes more sense and doesn't seem like a random story from the past as coalescent and transcendent do. regardless of all that: this book has fantastic characters and writing and if you like hard scifi, you will like this book.
 Space Opera at its (almost) best June 15, 2007
Adam Missner (Roswell, GA United States)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Space Opera at its (almost) best. Galactic War, interesting alien races, new societal concepts, time travel, hard science: Exultant has it all. Baxter even managed to resist making everyone[...] or some other silly transformations, even though the story takes place 20,000 years in the future or thereabouts. Really a terrific book that probably would have been even better if it was longer as he didn't have enough time to drill down on all the different concepts presented. You will definitely want to read it.
A little more space opera than normal for Baxter September 8, 2006
Alex J. Avriette (Arlington, Virginia USA)
Another reader characterized this work as "space opera." In fact, that's what Baxter has produced here. Much the same way Coalescent was, this book contains two major plot threads, which are (true to his normal style) related. Baxter's understanding of time dilation is keen, and he manages to explain it pretty well without using the typical deus-ex-machina style approach to it as other authors have.
That said, the book does have more or less cookie-cutter characters in it. The characters are all pretty wooden, and are nothing really new to me. For contrast, take some of the characters from Iain Banks' Culture books. While you still have gallavanting space oepra protagonists in the Banks books, there is vast depth to his portrayal (such as Sharrow in Against a Dark Background). However, reading a Baxter book, one has to understand that Baxter is an engineer, and is attempting to explain concepts and ideas, to project what he think a possible future may look like. Not to write a bedtime story about heroes and demons.
To that end, Baxter has done a very good job of taking this series (the Destiny's Children series, not all of the Xeelee Sequence) and extrapolating what seems to be Frank Tipler's ideas into a plausible description of a universe in which humanity is taking over.
Of the three books in the series, I do believe Exultant is my favorite. That's kind of sad, given it's 1500 pages, give or take. However, it's par for the course when you consider some of his other series, such as the Manifold books. It's not the misses which disappoint, it's the "hits" which are truly worth reading for.
Great imagery June 28, 2006
Tyler Forge (Sunnydale, CA)
I read this one after "Transcendent". I liked Exultant much better. Actually, I like Transcendent better now than after first reading it because of the way some of the undercurrents from Exultant flow into it.
Humanity's galactic stagnation in the face of a galactic war reminded me of some of Baxter's other books in which civilizations went stagnent or collapsed due to lack of resources or slavish devotion to ideology. I find it an interesting commentary on the present because we're facing possible energy starvation and are experiencing a resurgence in mysticism.
Then, there is the physics underlying it all. Baxter's fiction is about the best intro to cosmology I've encountered. Before I read Exultant, I never really distinguished the surface of a black hole from the event horizon. However, the preservation of energy within a black hole is disturbing because I always assumed that it was homogenous in there. Time to read some physics again because I'm sure Baxter bases his fiction on reality.
So many concepts to dwell on, so little time. I could not put this book down - and I'm a slow reader.
 A bit too scattered January 19, 2006
CampfireDan (Gainesville, FL)
Probably should have been titled "Conglomerant." It's main value may be its multiple insert chapters which overview the how and why of the Baxter multiverse. But I think that could have been better done with a separate small guide book rather than squeezing it into the cracks of a space opera. I think Mr. Baxter may be trying to tie together all the conflicting technologies, characters, plots, and alien species of his other works into a unified body of work. All well and good but all those walk-on aliens, post-humans, technologies and the history of everything seem to get in the way of the space opera plot rather than illuminating it much. And if there is an overarching, thought-provoking, philosphical point here I seem to have missed it. This novel does explain why there are so many life forms in his other novels (think "intelligent design" with a twist) but I don't catch anything meaningfull from that other than maybe it is an answer to some technical critics. Some good hard science concepts here though so it isn't a total loss. Might also be interesting to teen readers since the protagonist is a teen (and simultaneously in his early twenties) and there is a lot of space war action. Anyhow, I'm sort of hoping that a time travel event in the next novel in the series, "Transcendant," edits out this draft time line.
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