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Transcendent: Destiny's Children Book 3 (Gollancz S.F.)
 
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Transcendent: Destiny's Children Book 3 (Gollancz S.F.) (Hardcover)

by Stephen Baxter (Author)
2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
Price: £18.99 & this item Delivered FREE in the UK with Super Saver Delivery. See details and conditions
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Frequently Bought Together

Transcendent: Destiny's Children Book 3 (Gollancz S.F.) + Resplendent: Destiny's Children Book Four (Gollancz S.F.) + Exultant: Destiny's Children Book 2 (Gollancz S.F.)
Price For All Three: £30.87

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 496 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz (27 Oct 2005)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0575074302
  • ISBN-13: 978-0575074309
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15 x 4.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 75,324 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #17 in  Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > B > Baxter, Stephen

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Product Description

Product Description
Baxter's ability to combine wildly divergent narrative threads has become a trademark of his writing and has been seen to its best effect in the previous two novels from this sequence. TRANSCENDENT, with its melding of a near future narrative that carries a terrible warning about the post-oil and post-global warming world and a narrative thread that tours the fantastically varied diverse species that mankind has become in the impossibly distant future is an example of Baxter at his best. At once a cautionary tale of what we are capable of destroying and a celbration of what we could become this is the capstone to Baxter's best series to date. In TRANSCENDENT we find out what happened to the children of the Poole brothers (from COALESCENT) and what will happen to mankind.

About the Author
Stephen Baxter is the pre-eminent SF writer of his generation. Published around the world he has also won major awards in the UK, US, Germany, and Japan. Born in 1957 he has degrees from Cambridge and Southampton. He lives in Northumberland with his wife and their recently acquired springer spaniel.

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Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
2.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An extaordinary breadth of vision, 1 May 2006
This review is from: Transcendent: Destiny's Children Book 3 (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
It is no use trying to read this book on its own. It is absolutely imperative that the previous two novels in the Destiny's Children sequence are read first for it to make its correct impact. As you progress through the books it may at first feel that they have no connection with each other, but subtly and very cleverly the logic of the plot is revealed. This is what Science Fiction should be. The writing is masterly and Baxter's command of language is impressive. But these novels are no mere shoot-em-up as some reviewers seem to want. The intricacies of the plot, and its sheer scale are breathtaking in their vision and imagination, and nowhere else have I read anything which can compare with this for such a graphic description of the galaxy and its place in the universe.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars An updated 'Childhood's End', 29 Nov 2007
By Mondoro (Ormskirk, Lancashire United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Transcendent: Destiny's Children Book 3 (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
The opening dedication to Arthur C Clarke - a previous co-author with Baxter - is the clue: this is a re-casting of Clarke's classic 'Childhood's End', though on an infinitely bigger scale and capturing the terrifying immensity of a future gestalt of humanity. Kerellen, guide to the final generation of mankind in 'End', becomes Reath, destined never to experience Transcendence himself.

The second plot line, taking the story of the Poole family forward in the mid twenty-first century, alternates with the first in a way familiar in the other volumes in the series: it is less satisfactory and leaves a lot unexplained - what is obviously a catastrophic drop in population (cause -we are told, a lower birth rate in N America and Europe - what was happening in the Third World)?

I agree with the other reviewers who see this book as a marked drop in standard from Vols 1 (the best - and a rivetting story) and 2.
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8 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars Walking the plank off the side of science fiction, 9 Sep 2006
By Alex J. Avriette "Alex Avriette" (Arlington, Virginia USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Transcendent: Destiny's Children Book 3 (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)
I suppose it only made sense, after reading the previous two books, for Baxter to have wound up here. I mean, after Exultant, what was really left? I was hoping he would have tied things together, and continued the story. Instead, we fast forward from "now" to 500,000 years from now (whereas Exultant was 25,000 years from today, and coalescent was -1,500 years from today). Like the other two books, we have two plot threads. The nearer takes place in the near term future, in a somewhat contrived description of a pre-global-warming-apocalypse earth, with Yet Another Damn Poole taking the lead role (a bit like his Reid Malenfant in the Manifold series, which I grew to detest).

The other thread is what most irritated me. While I appreciated his grand tour of the possibilities of human evolution, I was put off by his wide-eyed speculation and what-if's. Many of the things he describes are fundamentally plausible, in the way that drag racing possibilities can be speculated on paper. But they ring hollow. Sure, you can described silicon-based life, but is it plausible? And the humans-made-dolphins (again, from Manifold) show up again, being equally silly this time around.

But, that's not really the worst of the book. Towards the end, the book lapses into navel-gazing, much in the way Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion does in the later part of the series. Sadly, it's just as hard to wrap your head around. The philosophical meandering doesn't make much sense, and seems to have very little to do with the previous books, or indeed the rest of the Xeelee Sequence. Certainly it's a departure from Ring, which was frankly an impressive epic set in the same sequence. But, really, what choice did he have by setting the environment half a million years from now?

The "contemporary" thread (set in the 2050's) is... "interesting," but also seems to borrow from the Malenfant stick figure he has developed elsewhere (and indeed the Peter character from Coalescent re-appears in this book with a different name, but the same physical description, neuroses, and agenda), as well as the notions in John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up. Sure, it made sense in Brunner's take on things, but we've _read_ that already. There's no sense in an educated engineer getting all misty eyed about global warming in a book set half a million years in the future.

So, sadly, the last book (although a fourth book, with short stories from the rest of the Coalescent books, has just been published) finishes the series by wobbling between "why am I reading this" and "this is just entirely silly."

Exultant is worth a read, but could probably be thrown into the Xeelee Sequence and read alongside Ring. Coalescent and Transcendant, I could do without.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars So disappointing - the title should have been 'Ordinary'
I thoroughly enjoyed 'Exultant'-book 2 in the series, and went straight into 'Transcendent'. Transcendent's story is a slow plod with dull descriptions of Michael Poole's life... Read more
Published on 13 April 2006 by Gandygut

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