Vacuum Diagrams

"And everywhere the Humans went, they found life..."

This dazzling future history, winner of the 2000 Philip K. Dick Award, is the most ambitious and exciting since Asimov's classic Foundation saga. It tells the story of Humankind - all the way to the end of the Universe itself.

Here, in luminous and vivid narratives spanning five million years, are the first Poole wormholes spanning the solar system; the conquest of Human planets by Squeem; GUTships that outrace light; the back-time invasion of the Qax: the mystery and legacy of the Xeelee, and their artifacts as large as small galaxies; photino birds and Dark Matter; and the Ring, where Ghost, Human, and Xeelee contemplate the awesome end of Time.

Stephen Baxter is the most acclaimed and accomplished of a brilliant new generation of authors who are expanding the vision of science fiction and taking it to a new golden age.

Contents:

• Foreword
• Prologue: Eve
• ERA: Expansion
• The Sun-People
• The Logic Pool
• Gossamer
• Cilia-of-Gold
• Lieserl
• ERA: Squeem Occupation
• Pilot
• The Xeelee Flower
• More Than Time or Distance
• The Switch
• ERA: Qax Occupation
• Blue Shift
• The Quagma Datum
• Planck Zero
• ERA: Assimilation
• The Gödel Sunflowers
• Vacuum Diagrams
• ERA: The War to End Wars
• Stowaway
• The Tyranny of Heaven
• Hero
• ERA: Flight
• Secret History
• ERA: Photino Victory
• Shell
• The Eighth Room
• The Baryonic Lords
• Epilogue: Eve
• The Xeelee Sequence: Timeline