PissWeakly Reviews: Xeelee Vengeance / Stephen Baxter

Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Xeelee Vengeance / Stephen Baxter

Xeelee Vengeance

(1 of 2... or 3 of ten)

by Stephen Baxter

science fiction

read in March 2018

rated 5/10: readable but only if there's nothing else

This is the author who took a Pratchett idea and turned it into an extremely boring and entirely pointless book series. Mind you, he has taken his own ideas and made them just as boring and pointless.

This book, however, is readable.

## Warning: Some of this review contains spoilers. Sorry about that. But some of the plot is just so laughably stupid that it deserves a mention.

No, the book is not "good" but it is readable. Okay, I was so bored that I started skipping pages. Still, there did seem to be a beginning, a middle and an end. With something happening -- very slowly -- along the way.

Baxter has clearly read the standard advice to authors: Show it, don't say it. He avoids long and interminable authorial explanations. Unfortunately he leaves these long and interminable explanations to be spoken by his characters. Wrong, wrong, wrong :-(

There is also a problem with the "conservation versus development" logic...

Humans finally saw the light and spent centuries restoring the ecology of Earth. Everything (including population, as far as I can tell) is now managed and controlled so as to protect the "natural" environment.

So what is humanity's goal in space and on other planets? Why, to terraform, exploit and overpopulate, of course!

Human society almost destroyed the Earth. Saw the error of their ways, restored the Earth. Now their aim is to make the exact same mistakes on every other planet and in all of space. Whoopee.

Then the aliens appear. One spaceship is black and huge and obviously evil, they let it sail by. Then another alien appears: small, apparently peaceful, transmitting a warning message. So the humans ask the messenger for help and advice -- not! They just blow it up.

They blow it up with a civil engineering tool which just happens to be useful as an extremely destructive missile. Later, they are shocked to find that other human spaceships also carry tools which may double as weapons. Oh! the humanity! Oh! the two-faced ignorance.

The action is on the scale of a Doc Smith book. In fact, I remember a planetary crust being slowly melted -- as happens in this book -- from a Skylark book. It was silly then, too. But more entertaining with the Skylark.

Because Baxter surrounds his action with pages of solid science. About as interesting as a science textbook to a sociology undergrad. Booooring. Where Smith mentions Einstein's light-speed limit, the heroes say, But that's just a theory. Then the pilot plants his foot -- and off they go, faster than light. Baxter would explain Einstein's theories. In extreme detail. Then, perhaps, carefully explain an alternate ftl theory, plant his foot and leave Einstein floundering behind.

This book is one of a sequence of two "Xeelee" books. Wikipedia names ten Xeelee books. Perhaps the other books -- especially those earlier in the chronology -- would make more sense of the characters and their history. As it is -- they are all just creepy. Nasty and manipulative, or slow and inactive. Until the final chapters the hero acts only when pushed by a woman with no apparent background.

So it's a pretty pathetic book.

Despite all that -- it can be read. Better yet -- it can be read by itself. Perhaps I would have liked the book a bit more if I understood the hero's family. So yes, a positive, it can be read as a standalone book. But no, it is hardly worth the effort.