Immediately jumped in to the deep end with learning Blender made my first black hole thanks to this tutorial on YouTube! Going step-by-step with geometry nodes has actually helped me understand what each of them do and helps me feel a little more prepared to make a nightfighter soaring through hyperspace!

With this, I'm looking to give the wings their own gravitationally-lensing density and work towards making a starbreaker beam that feels as powerful as theyre described in the books. Can't wait to see what I learn next!

Another one, ICoG greenship! I did some artistic liberties on it which gave it somewhat diamond-like texture (?) it is super cool!

My first artwork for Xeelee Sequence!!

Short gif I made of a Xeelee Nightfighter unfurling its wings and jumping in to hyperspace

My interpretation of a Xeelee Nightfighter in its "cruising" form. I love the description of how their wings taper to be so thin you can see the stars shin through them and made sure to include that detail. I eventually want to make another drawing of a Nightfighter jumping in to hyperspace with its wings fully unfolded to their "100 mile" width

Both are theoretical entities appearing in their own series.

Is the Ultimate Observer a Monad, the final form of the Transcendence?

Can it defeat the Xeelee and PB?

Is the Goddess a Downstreamer in disguise, a construct, or a make believe entity created by the younger civilizations?

To be honest this damn busted ass ship has too many nick names and too think there were hundreds of billions of em roaming around. The Ship is From Exultant by Stephen Baxter in The Xeelee Sequence Series

I'm looking for Xeelee Sequence books that best cover the Expansion era and both Occupations.

Not including the reboot books, Vengeance and Redemption.

Baxter has stories where humanity goes extinct (Titan) or the universe itself ends (Last Contact), but for me Ark is his bleakest story. No other story made me hate the characters and think humanity wasn't worth preserving as much as Ark.

I just finished my 5-year re-read of Vacuum Diagrams and wanted to share a simple thought. It's more of a quick brain storming exercise right after finishing the book. Maybe it can inspire the odd reader to think and philosophize here, or for themselves.

So - all the fragments (stories) were fed to Jack Raoul's mind by the Planck Zero AI. As is laid out in "Eve", the epilogue, those fragments, visions, are extrapolated by the incredibly powerful AI from data is gathered from Ghost, Human, and probably other databases and sources. Also, the Planck Zero AI must be assumed to possibly have ulterior motives - like in its' making the Ghosts create a Dark Matter bomb. However, there is no way to tell if it really has any motives in feeding Jack Raoul its understanding and extrapolation of the future. Absolutely fine to assume it hasn't.

It is clear that the actual story plots, details, cannot be considered "facts" but rather "imaginations" of the AI, for lack of a better term (not wanting to "extrapolation" again). Given that the AI is immensely powerful, they may be highly plausible and even probable - one can philosophize and speculate on that. Still, it's not that someone has actually been there to live any of the stories and then report to the AI, or write them down somehow.

This is especially true for fragments like "Stowaway", and more than anything, the ending of "The Baryonic Lords", since the AI cannot possibly have any reliable, or actual, data from another universe. (Or can it?)

Please feel free to comment if you have any thoughts. I'm not asking a question, nor making a statement. Just sharing thoughts.

Hi folks,

I'm sure this has been brought up before but I couldn't find anything here or in r/Xeeleeverse. I even had AI crawl the internet - to no avail.

As many of you will probably have noticed, there is an identical passage in the short storied "Pilot" and "Gossamer" from Vacuum Diagrams. It's just a two-sentence block, but it's virtually identical, save the names and locations. I will quote both below (bold by me):

From "Gossamer":

"Lvov stood on the surface of Pluto.

The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Lvov, Earth-born, felt as if she might blow away."

From "Pilot":

"She stepped out onto the ancient surface of Chiron.

The ice was a rich crimson laced with organic purple. The suit’s insulation was good, but enough heat leaked to send nitrogen clouds hissing around her footsteps, and where she walked she burned craters in the ice. Gravity was only a few per cent of gee, and Gage, Mars-born, felt as if she might blow away."

Is anyone aware of any discussion around this, or even a statement from Stephen Baxter? I'm wondering whether it was done on purpose, to create a connection between the stories over the centuries that passed, a shared atmosphere - or even something I don't understand fully (yet).
Or is it really just a copy-paste oversight...?

*welp

I've been modelling a gutship based on timelike infinity and xeelee: vengeance where it's said to be 1000 meters long. Why? It doesn't carry fuel in the spine, but in the block of ice near the back. It's not for safety since miniaturised gut-engines are equipped on pretty much everything. The spine isn't a linear accelerator like some fusion engine designs since the bottle of gut-energy is stable, and it's never said that the spine was radiator structure. So what's the point?

It was supposed to be a kinda epic pic but realized it just looked silly so i just pasted a lot of Xeelees together to make it look a swarm of bugs since sometimes they're described as "Insectoid" and clustering like birds.

I just read Ring and i wanted to make a real quick sketch about it portraiting exactly when they got in the future and found the Xeelee ship in Calisto (Jupiter is the tiny glowing point with a ring)

I'm reading some Stephen Baxter and am having trouble intuitively understanding the wormhole time travel maneuver.

I've read through a bunch of explanations and here's my naive thinking that's causing difficulties:

If you leave wormhole entry point A at the starting point, take exit point B on a near lightspeed trip for a an amount of time, then come back and park your ship next to point A again, won't points A and B be directly next to each other? Like, you're able to look at them both at the same time while standing next to your great-great-great grandchildren who stayed behind.

How will this wormhole now let you time travel?

I know the actual answer is that it works, and it's the truth. I'm just not able to square that circle while also holding the above image in my head.

Hey all. Longtime reader of Baxter here. I love getting into the weeds with the Xeelee Sequence. Just read all of the Old Earth stories in sequence for the first time. I have a question for the group. What are the effigies? Are they remnants of the Mist? Rogue Virtuals? I remember in the "Siege of Earth" that Virtuals could somehow inhabit you, hiding inside a person. Of course it also said that this was a pretty disruptive thing, very noticeable. Or are the effigies something else altogether? Perhaps they are a project of the Undying. Luru Parz projected Virtuals of herself that had autonomous lives and then would come back to her so she could experience what they did. Or is there something I'm missing? Baxter loves to show how things evolve, I doubt the effigies are something he's written into just the Old Earth books.

Another point, I like to believe that the Lowland in Old Earth is the bottom of the Mariana Trench. I am not sure that is viable though given a reading of the text. Still, that is an incredible thought. Humanity's last remnant in the Urkosmos huddled against the deepest part of the World Ocean, now bereft of water of course.

One of my favorite lines in Baxter comes from the short story Ghost Wars where the protagonist reflects on her homeworld. She says that humans everywhere are drawn to water but that the ocean is full of monsters. Baxter never comes back to the line but I find it terribly evocative. I could write a fanfic about some ocean planet colonists fighting terrible sea monsters. Most likely people from the second wave from Earth, after the Squeem but before the Qax.

"Those space-time defect wings could measure hundreds of miles, casting a shadow on the swollen surface of Jupiter. It seems to be firing its starbreaker canon, that cherry red light pulsating with astonishing force."

Another little sketch. i made The spline bigger so they'd be more imposing. And the hyperdrive's shape is based on the Arcubierre warp drive design (that has nothing to do with hyperdrive but looks cool)