Coalescent

January 28, 2008

Going into Coalescent after reading the second book, Exultant, was something of a disconcerting experience. Exultant takes place some 15,000 to 20,000 years after this and this story really takes place before the Xeelee Sequence is actually know. It's at the imaginative phase of things where you have people that are questioning just what it is that Dark Matter is and what kind of war in Heaven might actually be going on out there. It postulates a fascinating question in the science fiction world by saying that our radio signals out to the stars may be the wrong thing to send as it could attract the wrong kind of attention. Maybe it's quiet out ther because other races learned to be silent and unnoticed for a reason.

That's a very small part of the book however, yest it proved to be the most fascinating and engaging elements of it. Where Coalescent truly proved to be difficult is in how it approaches its modern day tale. The story ostensibly revolves around George Poole, an ancestor of the more famous Michael Poole from later centuries in the Xeelee Sequence. George has just learned that his father died and in taking care of things has discovered that he had an older sister who was sent off to something mysterious called the Order of Mary Queen of Virgins in Italy. This sends him on a discovery to find out what happened to his family when he was just a babe and why she seemingly made out better for it. With his life, now in his early forties, seeming like it has nowhere to go, it's the right time for such a journey.

That journey is a fascinating one if one that takes some time to really unravel. What George discovers is that his sister, Rosa, ended up in an ancient order that has been around for about sixteen centuries and has a massive and deep Crypt below Rome where records have been kept pure for all that time. While Europe was ravaged across the centuries, knowledge and "truth" survived here. But those that keep the records and move forward have evolved in a different way and taken on a hive mentality, both physically and emotionally. Exploration of this divergence in humanity is very engaging if drawn out a bit more than it needs to be.

Where the book really had a hard time in hold my attention is its split method of storytelling. The modern day tale of George is engaging and fun to watch unravel, but it's paired up against other stories. The first section of the book parallels it with his great"est" ancestor Regina, the woman who found patterns in humanity and subconsciously began the Order and its hive mentality. That takes up a huge chunk of the book as we see her progress and views of the world from ancient Rome. It later shifts between the story of George and the modern day tale of Lucia, a young woman who is coming of age in the Crypt and has been chosen to be the one to provide the next generation of its members. Members that are born every three months or so in accelerated pregnancies.

The first section of the book was something I found incredibly difficult to get through when dealing with Regina. Some of this comes from reading so far in the future with the Xeelee in Exultant, but also because Baxter's style of writing just didn't click with me when it came to these ancient Roman times. When it shifted to Lucia it became more interesting as we saw the modern results of Regina's works. Subsequent sections delved into the time after Regina which covered numerous centuries of how the Order had changed. I also really liked how they took the hive concept to a futuristic realm and examined how it would run on a planetary scale, albeit briefly.

Baxter's ideas for Coalescent are certainly fascinating and a really interesting read for the most part. But it was an incredibly difficult book to get into simply because it's not what I expected from a book with ties to the Xeelee Sequence. Even worse, with its apparent connections to Michael Poole, I felt like there should have been more to it. It does provide some more context when going back to read his older works that do involve Poole, but this is a book that I think could have been condensed and streamlined more which would have given it more impact. It's good, but it's one of the weakest Stephen Baxter books I've read yet.