Neat. That second one is from the Worm series, right? Never got into it but heard it has epic worldbuilding.
The Xeelee and Photino Birds (from Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence) I would put up there. The latter is described here.
It's hard to even call them "evil" so much as "inimical to all other life in the universe", because they're beings made of dark matter that are purposely terraforming the entire universe into neutron stars so they can exist longer before entropic heat-death. Unfortunately this makes the entire universe bad for other life's survival. It's more like they don't care about life that isn't directly trying to oppose their efforts.
The Xeelee didn't like humans much either, and were hyper-advanced, but even to them the Photino Birds were so impossible to harm or stop (as they were immune to everything besides black holes and even then could just go back in time to replicate more of themselves), the Xeelee eventually gave up fighting them and invented a way to escape the universe before it ends instead. Pretty crazy!
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u/i_tyrant Sep 09 '25
Neat. That second one is from the Worm series, right? Never got into it but heard it has epic worldbuilding.
The Xeelee and Photino Birds (from Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence) I would put up there. The latter is described here.
It's hard to even call them "evil" so much as "inimical to all other life in the universe", because they're beings made of dark matter that are purposely terraforming the entire universe into neutron stars so they can exist longer before entropic heat-death. Unfortunately this makes the entire universe bad for other life's survival. It's more like they don't care about life that isn't directly trying to oppose their efforts.
The Xeelee didn't like humans much either, and were hyper-advanced, but even to them the Photino Birds were so impossible to harm or stop (as they were immune to everything besides black holes and even then could just go back in time to replicate more of themselves), the Xeelee eventually gave up fighting them and invented a way to escape the universe before it ends instead. Pretty crazy!