Ring (Xeelee Sequence #4) Book

I'll start with a quote from The Times which has to be one of the finest review quotes for any novel you'll ever read; "The book sends in to free-fall the most awesome ideas in science fiction today...What makes these ideas assimilable is the prism of people through which they are refracted...good SF reveals the mortal host in the machine."

With my reading of Ring Stephen Baxter has become my favourite modern science fiction author, comparable in terms of sheer pleasure brought through ideas and storytelling scope to the greats like Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein.

For days now I've been unable to stop myself from telling people how good this book is; a perfect blend of speculative high physics, a traditional adventure/exploration story updated to a story arc that takes place over 5 million years and yet through imaginative plotting maintains the same characters throughout. It's the first time I can remember being so totally engrossed in a science fiction story, fascinated by the universe building and willingly excited by end of chapter story revelations; there's just so much wonder contained within these 450 pages, more and more layers of awesome ideas and concepts and descriptions of theoretical events that last right through to the final page.

Lieserl the biologically engineered child who ages one year per day for spoilertastic reasons involving a 5 million year human plan to study the death of The Sun, and the opening chapter told from her point of view is just one of those feats of creation that will surely draw you in and excite your imagination as the assorted motley crew of travellers across space and time finally come face to face with Baxter's godlike creations, the Xeelee, and the ultimate artefact of their engineering prowess, the Ring.

Ring is technically the fourth book in the amazing Xeelee sequence but also stands completely alone as its own creation, as do the other three books in the series it turns out. I spent the entirety of Ring waiting for an explanation of how such wonderful and bizarre science fiction creations as earlier Xeelee books Flux and Raft could possibly be tied in to the same universe and the way Baxter links them is with quiet audacity, somewhat akin to the way Asimov returned to his Foundation sequence to link his Empire and Robots books in to it but with a great deal more subtlety. The numbering of this sequence seems arbitrary, in many ways you might get more from them by taking on this wondrous creation first and then taking the other three as an expansion of the themes and ideas contained within.