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  YOU ARE HERE : Home > Categories > Books > Sci-Fi > Destiny's Children : 3 : Transcendent
  ProdID: 903 - Destiny's Children : 3 : TranscendentWritten byStephen Baxter Product Score: 9.5 
Destiny's Children : 3 : Transcendent

Price : tba
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Available : December 2005

'The girl from the future told me the sky is full of dying worlds'

As the world struggles through the middle years of the 21st century; global warming, the end of oil, Michael Poole is being haunted. By the far future. Or a far future at least.

A future where the Transcendents have made themselves into something unimaginably powerful, unimaginably different. A future where they would be on the cusp of godhood and would finally leave being human behind.

But a future tortured by regret. A very human regret. A regret that has to be resolved before they can achieve godhood.

A future that must fold down into the present.

And in that far future a young woman begins an epic journey, across the countless human worlds where mankind has evolved into countless different forms, towards the Transcendence and a different way of being.
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Lose Track of Time
Tucker   Review #1148 - Dated: 19th of March, 2006
  Author: Tucker

Though an absolutely STUNNING conclusion to [[s=destiny+children]]the trilogy[[/s]], this novel is again the victim of massive temporal dislocation syndrome... in laymans terms, each chapter is set at one end or the other of a 500,000 year gap in time.

However, this is a necessary evil, and not as distracting as [link^878^the first book^link] was, since a form of time bridge is kept throughout the storyline, with time-jaunts, the explanation of the Kuiper Anomaly's arrival, and sudden departure, and purpose too, and the ever-present Witnessing Tank that the lead future-zone character uses with extreme frequency to spy on the past. This not only explains a lot of things from the first 2 books, but also stops the story from seeming so fractured and distant.

Though I still fancy [link^888^book 2^link] the best, this book is not only awesome, but necessary, to tie the whole story together across a vast expanse of time. The sheer scope of the story is audacious, and only a master author like [[s=stephen+baxter]]Stephen Baxter[[/s]] could pull it off with such a smooth series of plot shifts, not only across time and space, but also across possiblity-timelines and cultures whose spectrum is almost as vast as the time-shifting itself.

Though it is a huge tome, weighty in it's mass as well as impact, it was quite easy to get utterly lost in, blowing away a stunning 4-hour reading session in what felt a mere 25 minutes. I was astounded when I put it down and realised there wasn't a dink in the spine caused by my bookmark, for well over 280 pages!

Overall, each book in the series has it's own appealing features and drawbacks, along with a completely different style inbook 2, but the series as a whole is a masterpiece, verging on the scope and fame of Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy". If you really enjoy setting down roots and digging in to a good book or three, you really ought to have found Baxter by now. If not, but if you like [[s=greg+egan]]Greg Egan[[/s]], Greg Bear or [[s=peter+hamilton]]Peter F. Hamilton[[/s]], then you will find Baxter's work right in tune with your literary pleasures.

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Printed at 01:53:56am on Friday 29th March 2024