Vacuum Diagrams
I’ve finished reading Stephen Baxter’s Vacuum Diagrams. It’s a collection of short science fiction stories set in the Xeelee Sequence universe, starting from a few thousand years in the future to millions of years into the future. It’s an awe-inspiring sequence of stories that spans the universe in the tradition of hard science fiction, although it does paint a bleak future for the human species. It’s probably better than what will actually happen in reality, though, considering that the universe is probably destined for a heat death.
The scale of the background story is immense, where even galaxies are but mere building blocks in a structure spanning millions of light years. Although this does make certain plot points feel wrong, such as when the effects of the destruction of this structure is almost immediately felt near the center, even though one would think it would take millions of years for the gravitational changes to reach it. Regardless, Stephen Baxter manages to write a universe rich with life and mind-numbing scale without making it sound like cheesy space opera.
