Literature / Xeelee Sequence

The Yin to Doctor Who's Yang.

"I have a vision of a Galaxy overrun by mankind from Core to Rim. Of four hundred billion stars each enslaved to the rhythms of Earth’s day, Earth’s year. I have a vision of a trillion planets pulsing to the beat of a human heart."

"And I have a vision of a child. Who will grow up knowing neither family nor comfort. Who will not be distracted by the illusion of a long life. Who will know nothing but honor and duty. Who will die joyously for the sake of mankind."

"That is a hero. And I will never know her name."

"Always remember: a brief life burns brightly."

— Hama Druz, The Founder of the Interim Coalition of Governance

The Xeelee Sequence, by Stephen Baxter, is a sprawling series of novels and short stories all set within the same universe.

In the far future, mankind expands out into a hostile universe, filled with intelligent species as weirdly varied as they are ruthless. Above them all, however, are the top dogs of the universe: the Xeelee, the god-like de-facto rulers of the universe. The novels of the "sequence" follow various threads, such as Earth being invaded and occupied by bizarre aliens, or a Hopeless War between mankind and the Xeelee, along with various other stories concerning humanity's place in a relatively bleak universe.

Overall, the Sequence is a loosely connected series, covering billions of years of history, with later stories expanding the scope to include the entire history of the universe, from beginning to end. The main connecting thread throughout all the novels are the Xeelee's enduring presence and influence on the history of the universe and mankind. The series has a definite chronology, but the novels and short stories were published in Anachronic Order. However, all of them can be read as individual stand-alone stories.

Novels in the Xeelee Sequence:

• Raft: A group of humans are stranded in an alternate universe where the force of gravity is much stronger.
• Timelike Infinity: Set during a time where Earth has been conquered by aliens. A group of cultists Time Travel 1,500 years into the past but, rather than warning anyone about the invasion, they follow their own inscrutable agenda.
• Flux: Follows a group of highly-modified humans who live inside a neutron star. A particular severe magnetic field instability, worse than any on record, threatens to destroy their home. To survive, a young woman must travel to a far off city, and eventually outside of the star itself.
• Ring: A generation ship is launched on a thousand-year mission, cruising near the speed of light. Five million years pass in the outside world due to time dilation. The ship arrives back in our Solar System only to find that the sun (and every other star in the observable universe) has aged prematurely into a red giant...something that shouldn't happen for another five billion years.
• Vacuum Diagrams (short story collection)
• The Destiny's Children sub-series
  • Coalescent: In contrast to the other novels, this is set on modern-day Earth, with flashbacks to the age of the Roman Empire. George Poole (uncle of Michael Poole, a prominent character in Transcendent) discovers he has a long-lost sister with ties to an ancient conspiracy.
  • Exultant: Set during one of mankind's hopeless wars against the Xeelee, this novel follows a young soldier who pulls off an exotic maneuver in battle which results in him time-traveling into the past and encountering his younger self. The bold tactic pays off and they capture a Xeelee ship. But when they return to Earth, he and his younger self are not welcomed as heroes for their breakthrough but rather tried as deserting criminals (true From a Certain Point of View) and learn about the dark side of their government.
  • Transcendent: Follows Michael Poole's early life, as well as a posthuman woman named Alia who's observing Michael's life half a million years in the future. Michael tries to save the near-future Earth's ecosystem from failing, all the while dealing with mysterious visions of his dead wife. A direct sequel to Coalescent, as George and several other characters show up.
  • Resplendent (short story collection)
• Xeelee: Endurance (short story collection)
• Xeelee: Vengeance
• Xeelee: Redemption

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This series provides examples of:

• Absolute Xenophobe: While recovering from the brutal Qax occupation that enforced stagnation and flirted with extinction, humanity adopts an extremely xenophobic imperative that aimed to ensure the future of the species (known as the Druz Doctrines after its founder, Hama Druz). When humanity begins to expand into the galaxy, they become responsible for killing off the entire non-human population of at least one galaxy.
• Ace Pilot: Jim Bolder, hence his being entrusted with a Xeelee nightfighter by the Qax, with bad results. For them.
• The Ageless:
  • The Qax are practically immortal, since their convection cells can readily be renewed and replaced, without degradation of consciousness. Their human collaborators, the pharaohs, who receive immortality in exchange for service, also qualify.
  • The Qax’s tampering with the genomes of the pharaohs (one of whom is the ancestor of most of the Mayflower crew) imperfectly passes on to subsequent generations, so the Autarch ruling class on the Mayflower choose breeding partners from long-lived families to prolong their own lives, and after many millennia their subhuman descendants manage to breed immortality into themselves.
  • The Silver Ghosts are immortal unless killed. Being made of semi-independent components, these components might die but the Ghost itself does not.
• Age Without Youth: The pharaohs' immortality treatment is imperfect, in that they still age albeit slower than normal humans, as shown by Rusel, the 25000-year-old protagonist of Mayflower II, who spends most of his time sleeping and is barely able to function without his life support systems, and even moreso by the 994721-year-old Luru Parz in The Siege of Earth.
• Alien Sea: On the Core of Cores, there are oceans of some quasi-liquid material, thick and red as blood; they lap at lands that thrust above the general spherical surface.
• Alternate Timeline: Vengeance and Redemption are set in a second timeline that changes most of what we know from the rest of the series. Characters and personalities are taking very different paths, especially for people like Michael and Harry Poole. Monopole cannons have been put to use, a weapon that was humanity's best in the Exultant war period. The Squeem and Qax will most likely be unable to enslave humanity: even if they found the humans on Cold Earth or scattered, they already have technology that could win the war.
• Anachronic Order: The publication order of the stories does not correspond at all to the chronological order in which they happen.
• Apocalypse How - Class X4: Possibly one of the most infamous examples. Forget about the Photino Birds killing off the entire bulk multiverse through accelerated heat death. Even the Silver Ghosts, one of the weakest factions in the series, contemplated on just outright ending the entire universe through an artificial false vacuum collapse.
• Arch-Enemy: The Xeelee and the photino birds are at irreconcilable odds because each species is fundamentally seeking to threaten the ideal habitat of the other. Seemingly as a unified species, the Xeelee have concerned themselves with defeating the photino birds for almost the entire history of the universe.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: In her VR simulation of the Late Permian, Gea uses the term 'mammal-like reptile' to refer to animals that were not, like pareiasaurs and procolophonids.
• Attempted Rape: In Coalescent, a Saxon raider attempts to rape Brica when happening upon her and her mother Regina. Seeing her daughter in danger makes Regina realise that there are no lengths to which she will not go to protect her child, and she pretends to offer herself in place of Brica, then stabs the attacker with his own knife.
• Baby Factory: Possibly one of the most disturbing examples ever written into fiction. The Sequence is what happens when you objectify women down to its most logical conclusion. From the Coalescent human hives to the deformed women-turned-vending-machines in the Mayflower II. It is going to suck being female in this hellscape.
• The Bad Guys Win: Sort of, but if you want to go by technicality then the Photino Birds are the great antagonists and they end up winning the war.
  • Played straight with the war between the Silver Ghosts and the Coalition, with the Coalition eventually overcoming the formidable defences of the Ghosts and wiping every single Ghost from existence. This may also count with the wider war between the Coalition and the Xeelee, with the Coalition finally ousting the Xeelee from the Milky Way in Exultant. Although how much of a victory you can call that, knowing what happens to the Coalition, is up to debate.
  • Likewise, the earlier history on when the Squeem and Qax utterly crushed and brutalize humanity also counts in this regard.
• Balkanize Me: The Interim Coalition of Governance collapses almost immediately after the withdrawal of the Xeelee, leaving behind countless successor statelets. The Unifier's brief empire also suffers the same fate after its founder's assassination.
• Battle Trophy: The human-descended "drones" in In the Un-Black have the habit of taking trophies from their kills.
• Bee People: The Coalescent human hives, including the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, some of the outlying human colonies isolated during the Qax occupation, and the Coalition's Archive inside Olympus Mons. Males are outnumbered by females, most of whom are sterile and serve the hive as workers, helping their mothers produce more siblings; any female that becomes fertile will spend her entire life producing babies. For example, in the Order, boys are born, but there are few of them, and they either leave or are gay. Most girls do not reach puberty, remaining prepubescent in their physical appearance; those few that do develop a spermatheca and become veritable baby factories that can churn out hundreds of children from menarche to death. The women develop a way of communicating with each other through body language and pheromones that takes place almost unconsciously.
• Benevolent Precursors: The Xeelee are one of the first species to develop and gain sentience after the universe's formation; indeed, their progenitors are older than physics as we know them today. They rarely take direct interest in messing with lesser civilisations, and are usually benevolent in the rare case they do. Their ultimate goal is to provide a way for all baryonic species to escape the doomed universe and the photino birds via Bolder's Ring.
• BFG: An absurd example. But one of the standard issue weapons given to Green Army child soldiers of the Coalition are assault rifles that fires pellets that contain the raw mass-energy density of the Big Bang. Ergo, one of the most common weapons in the Coalition are Big Bang Rifles. The reason why the whole universe ain't exploding with the force of the Big Bang is because all of that energy is condensed into a shaped charge, so the resulting kinetic energy is focused into a point. And the crazy thing is? it is still as useless as a stapler against Xeelee Construction Material. If that is not a statement on how overpowered the Sequence is, I don't know what is.
• Big Brother Is Watching: The Coalition definitely have one of the most horrific forms of surveillance apparatus ever written into fiction. That is, the ability to use tactical and strategic foreknowledge to correctly predict a crime before it even happens. Your actions will be watched and monitored, and you will be harshly punished for a crime you have yet to commit. Just ask Pirius Red who learned it the hard way.
  • This is without factoring in the Office of Doctrinal Responsibility who ARE the Coalition's ideological secret police.
• Big Dumb Object:
  • Bolder's Ring, built by the titular aliens; it's constructed out of cosmic strings (and is revealed to be the cause of the Real Life Great Attractor) and is essentially a black hole that has been stretched into a one-dimensional loop millions of light years in length. It's eventually revealed to be an escape route for the Xeelee from the Universe, by means of tearing a hole in spacetime through the middle of the ring via the unimaginably strong gravitational forces created through its rotation.
  • The Sugar Lump — a perfect cube the size of a small moon, which appears to serve no purpose whatsoever. Later is revealed to be one of many identical devices which sent the Xeelee back in time to essentially create themselves using a Stable Time Loop.
  • The Snowflake is a regular tetrahedron built around the remains of a black dwarf. It measures over ten million miles along its edges. How it maintains its structure in the gravity well of the star remains unknown. While possessing about the same mass as the Earth, it has been puffed out like candy-floss, filled with struts, threads and whiskers of iron, like delicate scaffolding. It has a fractal architecture with the tetrahedron motif, repeated again and again, on all scales. It is actually a gigantic computer created by the Snowmen to record anything in the universe up to the quantum level.
  • The Xeelee Belt in Redemption (no relation to the Belt in Raft) is a circle a light year in circumference located in the centre of the galaxy. It rotates at near lightspeed, and because of relativistic effects, distances are compressed and time drastically slowed. The purpose of the Belt is to preserve a community of Xeelee into the very far future, when they will be able to tap dark energy for their own purposes, but the immense surface area and energy flows have attracted lesser species as well.
• Birth-Death Juxtaposition:
  • In Coalescent, the birth of Brica and the death of the midwife Cartumandua happens within minutes of each other.
  • The birth of spacetime-defect creatures is a quantum process. The uncertainty principle dictates that it is impossible to clone quantum information: it could be swapped around, but not copied. For the daughter to be born, the mother’s genotype has to be destroyed. Every birth required a death.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Xeelee ultimately lose against the Photino Birds and the universe becomes unsuitable for baryonic life. However in one last act, the Xeelee give the remnants of humanity and others a vessel to escape to a new universe where they can hopefully build civilization anew.
• Bizarre Alien Biology:
  • Qax biology is based around chemical cycles embedded in convection cells. A Qax is composed of millions of such cells that exist in any kind of turbulent fluid (water, air, gas giant, star, space-time). In short they’re highly organised, living storms.
  • The eponymous creatures in The Logic-Pool are a species of white light-worms who are living logical entities made of mathematical postulates and quantum non-linearity that live for the advancement of more and more complex math.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: The modified humans in Flux 'see' sound waves which are transmitted through the Air (their term for the neutron superfluid in the neutron star), 'smell' photons that can only diffuse slowly in the Air, and 'hear' temperature fluctuations.
• Blessed with Suck: Sometimes a pharaoh's children are born with Qax immortality. But they don’t all grow — they stop developing, at the age of two years or one year or six months or a month; some of them even stop growing in the womb and have to be aborted.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: By the time of the Coalition, there really isn't any faction that would be even considered remotely 'okay'. Even the factions considered 'nice' is more alien than anything else.
• The Blacksmith: Myrddin, the genius advisor of Artorius and supposedly a wizard, is depicted in Coalescent as an iron-making genius.
• Blob Monster: Swimmer-with-Somethings looks disturbingly like a flayed human, immersed in a kind of gummy soup within which smaller creatures swim.
• Bond Villain Stupidity:
  • When the second Qax governor of Earth takes two Spline warships and travels back in time 1500 years to invade Earth and destroy the human race, it brings alongside Jasoft Parz, the human ambassador to the Qax regime, with the intent of forcing him to watch Earth's destruction. Parz then proceeds to sabotage the warship, foiling the invasion, and even calls out the Qax on this:
    Jasoft Parz: And, even worse, you carried me — a human, one of the enemy — in your warship’s most vulnerable place; and for no other reason than to heighten the exquisiteness of your triumph. Complacency, Qax!
  • The Black Ghost's undoing comes from arrogantly letting a group of humans enter its lair, believing that their weapons can do nothing against it. It was partially correct in that none of the humans' weapons can penetrate its hide... but the Black Ghost surely didn't anticipate having said hide opened by the enemy's bare hands and mouth and then getting killed by a bullet that goes through this open wound.
• Brainwashed and Crazy:
  • The Coalition turns children as young as six into psychotic machines design to kill and kill only. One side character, for example, almost committed suicide just from the mere thought of doing something non-doctrinal. The main character from Exultant even suffered a minor existential crisis on what he would do once the Coalition finally drives off the Xeelee, as his life would become meaningless without perpetual bloodshed and genocides. That is how indoctrinated an average human has become. To say that the Coalition is a broken society made up of broken people, creating an environment that churns out even more broken people, is an understatement.
  • The Transcendence is no better, as they pretty much continued the Coalition's xenocidal campaigns on a much larger scale and have become so transhuman, that they no longer think in the same plane of human consiousness or morality; becoming just as alien as the aliens themselves.
• Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit":
  • The term photino bird is one, as these creatures are obviously not birds, or even matter at all.
  • To the tiny Starfolk that inhabit the neutron star in which Flux takes place, 'Air' is the neutron superfluid in which they live; 'plants' and 'animals' are, respectively, the sessile and mobile indigenous lifeforms of the star (the 'plants' are in turn divided into 'trees' and 'grasses'); 'wood' is the building material made from the 'trees'; 'leaves' are the edible appendages of the 'trees'; 'wheat' is the 'grass' cultivated for food ('bread'); 'Air-pigs' are the main 'animals' used as livestock; 'Air-boars' are the savage cousins of the Air-pigs; and there are also 'animals' called 'spin-spiders' and 'rays'.
  • The Squeem, the Titan fauna and the lifeforms of Beta are sometimes described as fish, spiders, birds, whales, trees or lilies, despite being aliens that only physically resemble these animals and plants.
  • Exultant uses terms as plant, animal, fish, bird, insect or flower to refer to the various types of lifeforms that inhabited the primordial universe, where atoms didn't even exist yet.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: Michael Poole casually calls his father Harry Poole by his first name. Later in her life Hank Poole starts to do the same thing to her mother, as generation differences are kinda blurred when her own son became a centenarian.
• Capital Offensive: Both the Starfall invasion of Earth and the Squeem invasion open with an attack on New York City, then-capital of humanity.
• Child Soldiers: Most of the main characters in Exultant. The Druz Doctrines' primary article of faith is that “a brief life burns brightly”: most of the human soldiers who fight the Xeelee are no older than 16.
• Clothes Make the Superman: In Hero, the amazing powers of the eponymous superhero come from his suit.
• Colonized Solar System: Humans start to colonise the Solar System during the 3rd millennium.
• Colony Drop: There's the extreme colony drop option where a Neutron Star is accelerated to high fraction of light speed and smashed into Bolder's Ring.
• Combat Clairvoyance: The Integrality's Adepts have a limited precognitive ability. They could see a few minutes, or less, into the future, and only aspects of it that concerned their own surroundings — their own destiny. That few minutes' edge made them formidable soldiers, enough to let them get out of the way of the next bullet.
• Conlang: In-Universe, as part of their great Extirpation to erase all human culture, the Qax force humans to speak a constructed language.
• The Conqueror: Sixty-five thousand years after the conquest of the Galaxy, the self-styled, charismatic, monstrous Unifier, using one human type as a weapon against another and carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, briefly forges an empire before his assassination leads to its disintegration.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Near the end of Ring, Louise and Spinner visit the same neutron star where Flux took place, and later, before the Great Northern passes through Bolder's Ring, its crew has a brief glimpse at the alternate universe depicted in Raft.
  • The Seer and the Silverman ends with the independent human colony pulling out the old Susy drive from The Quagma Datum for a wild plunge forward.
• Cool Gate: Bolder's Ring is a portal to other universes, meant to provide an escape for the Xeelee and other baryonic species if the universe was destroyed.
• Cool of Rule: All of the science is explained, and not just in a Hand Wave.
• Cool Ship: Xeelee nightfighters, which can travel at near-lightspeed even before they fire up their hyperdrive, by flapping wings made of folded space-time.
• Cosmic Entity: An extremely rare Hard Sci-Fi example. But nearly every ancient race such as the Monads, Xeelee and Photino Birds count as one given that they are omnipresent, omnipotent and are born from the very fabric of reality itself. Even Transcendent humanity would eventually reach that status.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Basically a Hard Sci-Fi take on the genre.
• Crapsack World: More like Crapsack multiverse. Seriously, Crapsack wouldn't even scratch the surface of the Sequence as it is one condensed Nightmare Fuel singularity. More can be read in the Nightmare Fuel section.
• Crazy-Prepared: A character in Vengence speculates, following the Xeelee accessing a large cache of Construction Material and other supplies on Mercury, that based on the principle of mediocrity the Xeelee likely keep similar caches in most solar systems just in case they ever need to travel back in time to wipe out a civilisation in that system before it can cause the Xeelee problems in the future.
• Creepy Good: The Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins is basically a group of Roman Christians who unconsciously adopt eusocial reproduction patterns because of the hardships during the end of the Western empire, eventually evolving away from standard Homo sapiens. They grew wealthy during centuries, and use most of that wealth for charity and educating those who would otherwise not recieve any education. Basically, they are really alien and creepy, but benevolent in their conscious goal (the unconscious one is, of course, preserving the hive).
• Cyborg: The Spline genetically engineered themselves to be organic starships, and support themselves by being hired by various alien empires. The employers can mount whatever weapons or equipment they want in each Spline, as long as it doesn't adversely affect the Spline's health.
• Dead All Along: When the crew of the Island reach Goober c, they meet Susan Chen, the last surviving original crew member of the Gourd, a scattership that was dragged to the planet a millennium ago via FTL by the Silver Ghosts, and what appears to be the degenerate descendants of the rest of the crew. In truth, the last of the crew died centuries before that, and what appeared to be the crew are simply biotechnological constructs created by the Ghosts to keep Susan sane.
• Dead Guy Junior: Symat, protagonist of The Siege of Earth, is named after Symat Suvan, an old friend of his creator Luru Parz, who lived nearly a million years before him and appears in Cadre Siblings.
• The Dead Have Names: On the nameless Rock that the protagonist of Riding the Rock visits, the soldiers carve the name of their dead on the surface. Within the grooves of each letter are inscribed more names, and there are many more layers of names nestled within each other.
  There were more layers than he could count, more names than could ever read if he stood here for the rest of his life. Just on this one Rock. And perhaps there were similar memorials on all the other bits of battered debris at every human emplacement, all the way around the core of the Galaxy, a great band of death stretching three thousand light-years across space and two thousand years deep in time.
• Deathbed Confession: Just before she dies, Cartumandua reveals to Regina that her father Marcus cheated his wife by sleeping with her and later atoned by castrating himself; he doesn't survive, and his death is one of the factors that forced Regina to move away from her family villa.
• Death by Childbirth: Morag, Michael Poole's wife, dies giving birth to their second child.
• Decapitated Army: The Black Ghost inspires its kind’s last effective stand. After its fall, the Ghosts' political unity fragments, and effective Ghost resistance to human conquest comes to an end.
• Deity of Human Origin: The Transcendence is a posthuman collective consciousness with billions of humans spread across the galaxy who are attempting to evolve into a form of godhood, in effect leaving their humanity behind.
• Democracy Is Flawed: Democracy from the largely liberal First Expansion Humanity didn't save its ass from a cruel, dark universe, filled with vastly superior and hostile aliens. It is telling that the Interim Coalition of Governance, one of the worst sci-fi polity ever written in its abject scale of its cruelty, is acknowledged in-universe as one of the longest standing human civilizations to have ever exist.
• Derelict Graveyard: The Reef is a heap of decommissioned automobiles piled up, crushed down on each other, glittering with bits of smashed windscreen and gaudy paintwork, the whole thing laced together by a patina of orange rust.
• Destroyer Deity: The ancestors of the Silver Ghosts venerated the pulsar that was destroying their sun, made it a god and called it 'Destroyer'.
• Determinator: Regina is single-minded in her intent to forge ahead and adapt to circumstances, and her instinct for survival often prompts her into heartless and calculating actions; she actually trades her daughter's sexual services to secure passage to Rome from Britain. But it's also this instinct for survival that informs her leadership of the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, and her ideas about the preservation of bloodlines that becomes the Order's modus operandi in the subsequent centuries.
• Deus est Machina: The anti-Xeelee is an AI created by the Xeelee with a purpose: to go back in time and found the civilisation that built it at the beginning of time, so they'll have a billion year technological jump on all other intelligent life. Its hardware: Absolutely none — it's encoded directly into the quantum structure of the universe. Its attitude on everything: dryly amused.
• The Dictatorship: The Interim Coalition of Governance is a deranged, unhinged, time-traveling, totalitarian oligarchical dictatorship of unparalleled cruelty in all of fiction, and its structure is very similar to that of Oceania. The Coalition's structure is broken down as can be seen here:
  • Grand Conclave: The central ruling polity of the Coalition. The Grand Conclave is a type of council that rules over a number of Commissionaries at all times; each representing the various Ministries and Councils that forms the overall bureaucratic structure of the wider Coalition. Each Ministries all report to a single Grand Conclave member such as the Plenipotentiary of Total War. Overall, the Grand Conclave is composed of twelve representatives of Humanity.
  • Plenipotentiary of Total War: A sub-body of the Grand Conclave. As its name implies, the Plenipotentiary deals with the perpetual, neverending war conducted by the Coalition against the various alien threats humanity face over the millennia. It is in charge of current Coalition strategies, the Green Army and the Green Navy and they are responsible for the sheer wastage of resources to combat the Xeelee.
    • War Cabinet: A Subcommittee in the Coalition, dedicated to the sole purpose of the war effort against the Xeelee. It responds directly to the Plenipotentiary of Total War.
  • Commission of Historical Truth: Their job is to explore any new methodologies of increasing the effectiveness of warfare, as well as documenting the various tactics and possible futures for the military for cataloguing purposes. This Commission makes heavy use (if not, complete dependence) on the Library of Futures to document and record all known and potential futures for the Green Army and Navy. Due to its immense task and scope relating to strategic foreknowledge, the Commission sets up various academies across the galaxy dedicated to various projects, such as the cultivation of food to better feed the innumerable child soldiers to even the Silver Ghost colony on Pluto.
  • Conurbation Councils: These are the ruling bodies of the various cities across Earth’s surface. They therefore act as representatives to the Grand Conclave during annual meetings and events. It is the Conurbation Councils that deal with housing and the various administrative tasks of running the various cities.
  • Ministry of Economic Warfare: As its name implies, this Ministry is responsible for all available technology and projects that lead to a more effective form of warfare, such as the improvement of nanomachine-based food production. It also ensures the complete dedication of all of the Coalition’s resources to the war effort in a more cost-effective measure. Any and all weaknesses in the Coalition's economy will be inspected on as the Coalition runs on a perpetual war economy. Ergo, the only form of production would be weapons of war and the only form of consumption are weapons of war. Private ownership is basically non-existant and even 'civilian' products are few and far between.
    • Surveyors of Revenues: The pen pushers and estate holders of the Grand Conclave. They are the banking and financial branch of the Coalition, serving to preserve the Coalition’s economy of war. May possible work under the rule of the Ministry of Economic Warfare.
    • Auditor General’s Office: Another sub-position that falls under the preview of the Ministry of Economic Warfare. The Auditor General’s Office is responsible for any accounts of Coalition citizens and the personal banking of each member of the Coalition.
  • Ministry of Supply: The Ministry of Supply is the ministry in charge of logistics and logistics only. It is responsible for the supply ships and various other materials needed for the war effort against the Xeelee, making sure that all materials needed are supplied to the correct locations and the correct time.
    • Guild of Navigators: A guild whose chief role is to become overglorified mapmakers for the Coalition. It is their task to ensure that ships around the galaxy are aware of their destinations and their journey routes. May possibly work under the rule of the Ministry of Supply given their similar roles.
  • Ministry of Production: The work-engine of the Coalition, the Ministry of Production is the body responsible for ensuring the production of all weaponry, ships and technology necessary for the war against the Xeelee. From ships to monopole cannons, this Ministry ensures that there is plentiful supply for the Green Army and the Navy. If you want to know if it produces anything outside of war, then the answer would be zero.
    • Guild of Engineers: A guild whose primary purpose is to act as the R&D arm of the Coalition. Somewhat similar to the Ministry of Production, except that they most likely work under their rule. It is their job to ensure the research and development of new weapons and the construction of projects to aid the Coalition in its war effort. It was formed during the early years of the Assimilation.
  • Ministry of Public Enlightenment: The Coalition's Ministry of Truth. The propaganda arm of the entire polity that is in charged of overseeing the Coalition's media section. It is their job to ensure the distribution of Doctrinal advice and law to all aspects of the public in the Interim Coalition of Governance.
    • Guild of Communicators: A guild that is responsible for the broadcasting of all official channels in the Coalition and is also responsible for ensuring fast and effective communication between any of it’s citizens. Works under the rule of the Ministry of Public Enlightenment.
  • Ministry of Psychological Warfare: Pretty on the nose, this Ministry is responsible for any wartime projects of the Coalition dedicated to psychological warfare against the various alien races as well as psychological conditioning for the Coalition's inhabitants. This naturally has no effect on the Xeelee, but against the past wars of the Silver Ghosts and other 'lesser' races, it proved its purpose.
  • Benefactors: They are the medical service of the Coalition. They provide free hospitals for the civilians of the galaxy and provide dole handouts to poorer citizens. This has less to do with altruism and more to do with buying loyalty and ensuring that any civilians would 'gladly volunteer' their services into the military later on for 'repayment'.
• Distant Finale:
  • The final chapters of Timelike Infinity take place five million years in the far future, after Michael Poole is trapped there due to the destabilisation of the wormhole interface.
  • Most of Coalescent is set from the waning days of the Western Roman Empire to 2005, except for half of the final part, which takes place during the Third Expansion, in a human colony that has been knocked out of its solar orbit, and whose inhabitants have developed eusociality to adapt to living underground in the scarcity of living space and resources.
  • Ring ends in the very far future where the Photino Birds rule the universe, all stars have died and proton decay is decomposing their corpses. Michael Poole, with Nothing Left to Do but Die, kills himself by falling into a neutron star.
• Doomed Hometown:
  • In Raft (which is set in an Alternate Dimension), the nebula where the humans live is turning into an increasingly hostile environment and the humans, suffering the effects of environmental collapse, need to migrate to another nebula. In its sequel Gravity Dreams, the alternate universe itself is dying, and the story involves the humans trying to get back to their home dimension.
  • In the Photino Victory stories, the humans' Pocket Dimension is failing and will eventually freeze and become uninhabitable. The theme of The Baryonic Lords is the humans' search for a way to escape their dying home and seek another.
  • The entire universe is this for the baryonic species: there's no way to prevent the photino birds from making the universe uninhabitable for them. The goal of the Xeelee is to provide a way out of the universe for all baryonic species via Bolder's Ring.
• Dysfunctional Family: The relations between the members of the Poole family are a non-stop car wreck.
• Dyson Sphere: The setting of The Lakes of Light is a star encased wholly by a sphere made up of Xeelee construction material. During the Xeelee Scourge, the Xeelee take care of the human vermin by encasing their star systems within such spheres.
• Dystopia: One of the bleakest examples in literary history, which is considered one hell of a feat. The sheer levels of nihilistic destruction, trauma on a cross-generational scale, time-travel abuse, and tyrannical despotism on a multi-millennia and multi-galactical scale rivals the likes of 1984 and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream. It is of no surprise that 1d4chan considers the Xeelee, alongside '84 and I Have No Mouth as the Holy Trinity of Dystopias. Nightmare Hellscape, indeed.
• Dystopia Justifies the Means: If the above quote from Hama Druz isn't already a hint on how utterly despair-ful the Sequence is, then the sheer scale of despair on an epochal scale should be a good indicator. It cannot be understated how horrible the Coalition is, even by the already horrific standards of the Sequence.
• Egopolis: The capital of the tiny humans in Flux, Parz City, is most likely named after Luru Parz.
• Elaborate Underground Base: The Order runs a vast subterranean complex located beneath the Catacombs, the ancient underground Christian tombs on the outskirts of Rome, described by George Poole as a nuclear bunker and Vatican crypt rolled into one.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Xeelee are creatures made of the raw fabric of the universe twisted into arcane forms that lived and forged long-forgotten civilizations in the first billionth of a second of the universe's existence and have watched the passing of aeons. They were here when the primal forces diverged from each other when the universe shifted from an opaque plasma soup to a transparent world of blackness and stars when civilizations cried out against the first birth of the atom. It is hinted that Xeelee has combined with their technology (and possibly symbiotes) to such a degree that they have no real 'body'.
  • Photino birds are a super-symmetric species of dark matter entities that inhabit the gravity wells of stars, with a multi-billion-year life span and the ability to travel faster than the speed of light. Photino birds have begun their existence shortly after the birth of the universe and have existed in a continual time loop, so their relative age is effectively infinite, and their knowledge and technology keep accumulating. Being made of dark matter, they are immune to any non-gravity-based attack. They are capable of moving galaxies easily and accelerating them to relativistic speeds for use as projectiles.
  • The anti-Xeelee is an artificial intelligence created by the Xeelee billions of years ago (or billions of years ahead, in the far future) to ensure their great projects would be completed. The anti-Xeelee is an incorporeal entity made of probability quantum wave functions that fill the universe like a spiderweb. The anti-Xeelee awareness is spread across the entire universe and is not bound by the restraints of time or space. It is also acausal — in the sense, there's no beginning or end to it, it's always there in some form or another. As a particle with a negative vector in time, its main job is to travel backward in time as a reverse time capsule to speed up Xeelee evolution.
• Eldritch Location: Raft is set in an alternate universe where the gravitational force is a "billion" times as strong as our own. Stars are only a mile across and have extremely brief lives, becoming cooled kernels a hundred yards wide with a surface gravity of five g. Humans possess a "respectable" gravity field in and of themselves.
• The Empire: The Coalition regime is repressive, controlled, fanatical, extremely xenocidal, and responsible for the staggering slaughter and extinction of virtually all other sentient life in the galaxy. Their ultimate goal is basically the complete genocide of all non-human civilisations everywhere. Among the strongest of the Coalition's successor states, the Ideocracy is explicitly the Coalition 2.0, except they are even more hypocritical and willing to actively manufacture an apparent nonhuman threat, while their enemy, the Kardish Imperium, is aggressive, intolerant and jingoistic.
• Empire with a Dark Secret: The Silver Ghosts spend a million years denying the bloody civil war that followed the death of their sun, and they don't want anyone else to learn about its existence either. But that doesn't compare to the skeletons that the Coalition keeps in its closet.
• Endless Daytime:
  • When the universe was ten million years old, many worlds were warmed by the afterglow of the Big Bang itself, where the sky was still glowing with a comfortable heat. The whole universe was then habitable, where you could potentially find liquid water on any planet surface, no matter how far from a star.
  • The home planet of the Silver Ghosts and many others are tidally locked to their sun, meaning that one side experiences perpetual daytime and the other perpetual night time.
  • The planets located near the centre of the galaxy (like Base 478 in Between Worlds), despite the absence of a sun, never know night due to the heavy star density near the galactic core.
• Enemy Mine: Once the Black Ghost comes into power and starts to lead the Silver Ghosts in an effective resistance war against the Coalition, a group of rebellious Ghosts decide to cooperate with the humans and help them assassinate the Black Ghost, in full knowledge that they'll be enslaved or exterminated after the Coalition wins; because they'd prefer such an outcome over what could happen if the Black Ghost wins: either human and Ghost will enter an arms race and devastate the galaxy; or the Black Ghost unleashes such destruction that nothing will be left for the victor.
• Energy Absorption: Its exotic properties allow Xeelee construction material to absorb energy in a perfect way, one hundred percent efficient. In fact, it "grows" from radiant energy, causing energy weapons to not only be useless but also 'restore' anything made of Xeelee construction material. It is, however, susceptible to be damage from spacetime flaws or weapons that distort and/or change spacetime itself (like monopoles, singularities, starbreakers etc).
• Energy Weapon: One of the Coalition's standard-issue weapons are laser rifles. Unlike the majority of Sci-Fi, the lasers depicted in the Xeelee are accurate to real physics. They are invisible, provide no recoil and its affects can only be seen on whatever is being targeted at. It is also - as per tradition - absurdly overpowered; capable of liquifying a large steel boat instataneously and vapourizing scores of humans in a single flash.
  • To a lesser extent, the Starbreakers and Monopole Cannons can also be considered one, although they veer more into the gravitational weapon category than true directed energy.
• Eternal Engine: The Coalition dedicates certain planets as factory world to generate the materials and weaponry used by the Green Army and Navy along the Front.
• Evil Is Bigger: The Interim Coalition of Governance was the most dominant faction of the Milky Way Galaxy for 20,000 years, and these guys were downright monstrous. The Transcendence were even bigger and more powerful, occupying an entire galactic supercluster and was just as unhinged and deranged as the Coalition.
  • Out of universe, the Xeelee Sequence is this to its fellow contemproary dystopias.
• Evil Is Petty: With how batshit insane the Coalition is, it is no surprise that their callous mass extermination of the Silver Ghost for simply just being in the way is completely unnecessary. This is doubly so for their war with the Xeelee. The war with the Xeelee is such a big waste of time and human resources that even Pirius, the main character in Exultant lamented how much of a huge waste it is. But that didn't stop the Coalition from waging an endless war with the Xeelee for 20,000 years just because the Xeelee are aliens.
  • The Transcendence is also no better, continuing the pointless blood feud with the Xeelee across the universe all because they don't like the idea of humanity being second best.
  • Than there is the Qax, whose answer to their human slaves rebelling is to try every attempt including time travel, to annhilate humanity from all existence. Like humanity's relationship with the Xeelee, the Qax has a eternal blood feud with humanity that stretches for 500,000 years.
• Evil Poacher: A group called the Last Hunters seek to become the killer of the last individual of each endangered animal species.
• Evil Versus Evil: In the finale of The Baryonic Lords, Paul tricks the photino birds into thinking the Xeelee are returning, leading them to aggressively ramp up their destruction of the Ring. The genocidal Qax remnants — who have been waiting patiently to exterminate the last humans — have a collective "oh shit" moment and lead a last ditch attack on the birds at the Ring so that they can escape the universe. The humans use the confusion of the battle to sneak through the Ring, escaping both the Qax and the slow death from the machinations of the birds.
• Fantastic Caste System: The society in Raft is highly stratified, led by the Officers, descended from the officers of the original ship that came through Bolder's Ring, who share the Raft (the remains of the ship that contains almost all the high technology) with the scientists and some of the labourers; the various Belt worlds are inhabited by the majority of miners that mine burnt-out star kernels in bad conditions; and there are the cannibalistic Boneys who live on worlds created out of corpses. People are born into their class, work in it throughout their life and usually die in it. There is talk about being able to rise to the top with talent, but this seems to be predominantly a myth. There is at least one case where this happens (Rees) but it's clearly far from usual.
• Fantastic Naming Convention: The nobility of Old Earth write their given name and surname as a single word in a CamelCase style. Only the eldest son and eldest daughter of each couple inherit their father's surname, the others taking the surname of their mother.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Subverted. Yes, if you view the ICoG under the lense of a modern human society, its abillity to provide welfare to its citizens is, to put it lightly, horrendously ineffecient. But that in itself is a problem isn't it? As the ICoG is NOT a normal human society. It is a posthuman one and the Coalition was never built originally to be a utopia for mankind. Rather, the goal of Druz's Coalition is to prevent humanity from evolving at all cost, exterminate all potential existential threats of humanity and to unite and give humanity purpose for the first time in millennia no matter how monstrous the steps needed to take in achieving it. In that case, the Coalition proves to be both Fascistic and effecient to a horrifying degree. So once the Xeelee finally high-tailed it, the original goals of Druz became completed. And as such, the Coalition collapses almost immediately after the Xeelee withdrew from the galaxy as there were no reason for the Coalition to exist.
• The Federation: During the earliest moments of the universe, before the breakup of the GUT force, a multispecies federation established itself among the spacetime-defect creatures of this age.
• Final Solution: With a series as dark as the Sequence, this has become the standard operational procedure for nearly every faction in the series. Humanity obviously has this in spades through the Coalition and post-Coalition on both a galactic and universal scale against all aliens. The Qax has this for humanity ever since their homeworld was destroyed. Even the Silver Ghosts had something more akin to a suicide pact during the height of their war with the Coalition.
• Flash Sideways: In Vengeance and Redemption (which take place in an alternate timeline), the Poole family archive includes, among others, prophecies of a future that will never come (or in other words, the story of the main timeline).
  The Poole family archive had spoken of this species. One day, a humanity still restricted to the Solar System would have been conquered by the Qax. Enslaved. Would have been enslaved. With humanity already scattered to the stars, Jophiel supposed that particular fate had been averted.
• Flash Step: The people on the Nord have the ability to teleport by effort of will, called Skimming.
• Flat Character: The story generally doesn't have much interest in its characters, with people being important only insofar as they've connected to current ideologies, current economic realities, or certain modes of scientific inquiry.
• Floating Continent: The first generations of human colonists on Venus live in cities floating in the Venusian sky.
• The Fog of Ages: Luru Parz claims that the pharaohs can remember events from throughout their lives, but no more or less clearly than a normal person. Sometimes, events may bring forth a distinct memory that hadn't been recalled in several thousand years.
  Luru Parz: The scientists used to say that the human brain can accommodate only perhaps a thousand years’ experience. It isn’t as simple as that. Of course we edit our memories, all the time. We construct stories; otherwise we could not survive in a chaotic, merciless universe that cares nothing for us. If I think back to the past, yes, perhaps I can retrieve a fragment of a story I have lived. But I live on, and on, and on, and if I look back now I can’t be sure if I am visiting a memory, or a memory of a memory… Sometimes it seems that everything that went before today was nothing but a dream. But then I will touch the surface of a Conurbation wall, or I will smell a spice that was once popular in Port Sol, and my mind will be flooded with places, faces, voices — not as if it were yesterday, but as if it were today. And do you know what? I regret. I regret what is lost, people and places long vanished. Of course it is absurd. There isn’t room in the universe for them all, if they had lived. And besides I chose to leave them behind. But I regret even so. Isn’t that foolish?
• Forced to Watch:
  • After the extermination of a Squeem colony in Lake Superior, the Squeem decide to round out all people who were involved in the act in concentration camps and force them to watch as they freeze all of the water on Earth, killing many humans and causing many species to go extinct.
  • The Qax governor of Earth from the future brings along Jasoft Parz during its invasion of Earth in the past, with the intention of forcing him to watch Earth's destruction. Unfortunately for the Qax, Parz was never loyal to them at the first place.
  • What happens to the Silver Ghost civilians once they lost the war with humanity, as Silver Ghost parents were forced to watch as the Coalition systematically start skinning their children for shits and giggles, and turn their skin into solar sails.
• Foregone Conclusion: In the first part of Coalescent, which is set in Britain after the end of Roman rule, many ex-Roman citizens consider that their hardship is only temporary until the Emperor can sort out his difficulties and reassert his rule over the abandoned province. If you know your history, though, you're going to know that the Western Roman Empire is already on life support in this time, and no Emperor will come to defend Britain from the Saxons who will conquer the southeastern part of the island.
• Forever War: The Xeelee are nearly immortal, and humanity quickly proves itself a race of consummate survivors. They don't like each other. Do the math. But even that pales before the Xeelee-Photino war.
  • Mankind vs. Qax. Infuriated by their improbable repulsion from an enslaved earth, and further goaded by humanity being indirectly responsible for the destruction of their home system, the Qax bear their grudge so long that it becomes a species imperative (i.e. eat, breathe, breed, destroy all humans).
• Formerly Sapient Species: In conditions that do not change and where innovation is not necessary or taboo, humans have a tendency to breed intelligence out of themselves; for example, the Shipbuilders in Between Worlds and transients (mortal human crew) on the Mayflower generation ship are little more than beasts that can nonetheless maintain their ships out of instinct because that's their way of attracting sexual partners, the Coalescent hive that appears at the end of Coalescent, the fish-like posthumans that briefly appear in Transcendent, the savage 'drones' in In the Un-Black, among others.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Invoked by Reth Cana when he is trying to find a way for humans to enter configuration space — a realm beyond human experience. Reth constructs metaphors, a kind of interface to make its features accessible to human minds. There is an island — a beach. At the centre is a mountain that represents order, and at its peak is that special dust grain that represents the initial singularity: the Big Bang. The sea is the opposite — maximal entropy — the ocean of meaninglessness to which everything washes, in the end.
• Freudian Excuse: While the Coalition is completely insane, irrational and wasteful, they at least have reasons. Twice occupied by alien powers. Last occupation erased all human history and destroyed Earth's biosphere, placed immortal Quislings to rule humans... And all the species in the galaxy that ventured out of their home systems were more or less that. Opportunistic imperialism and capitalism, any real invention blocked by subconscious inferiority to Xeelee and knowledge that no matter how good you do, the Xeelee have invented it and perfected it before your Sun existed. Sure, some species weren't evil, but the trauma on human civilisation was too great to make any decisions about who lives and who dies, so they killed them all.
• From Bad to Worse: It is safe to say that things just gets worse as the story progresses. There is a reason why the Xeelee Sequence can be a bit tough to read as you would know how things would end.
• Full-Boar Action: The 'Air-boars' that inhabit the neutron star in Flux are described as savage cousins of the Air-pigs used by the transhuman habitants as livestock. One of them kickstarts the plot of the story by goring Adda, forcing Dura and Farr to seek work in Parz City to pay for Adda's treatment.
• Future Food Is Artificial: The Coalition sustains its massive population of disposable child soldiers with synthetic gruel made out of nanomachines. Given that Earth has been twice sterilised, the amount of natural food is few and far between.
• Future Slang: The word Lethe comes to be used in this manner from the time of Transcendent onward.
• Gemstone Assault: The projectiles (dubbed Probes by humans) launched from the Cache to the human habitats on Earth, the Moon and Mars are diamond rough spheres.
• Gender-Blender Name: The protagonist of The Venus Generations is a woman named Hank Poole.
• Generation Ships: Mayflower II is set on a generation ship bound for a satellite galaxy 25,000 light years away; at .5c, the trip will take fifty thousand years. A crew of pharaohs rule over the mortal transients. As the ship drifts through space and time, the society of the transients breaks down as the pharaohs slowly die off, evolving into beasts who only maintain the ship out of instinct.
• Genius Bruiser: The tribelike mannerisms of the Boneys from Raft hide minds well-versed in orbital mechanics to rival trained scientists.
• Genre Deconstruction: Some view the Sequence as a whole, to the Cosmic Horror Story genre. The Eldritch Abominations in the Sequence aren't depicted as a all-consuming apathethic cosmic evil. Each of the ancient races follow a pattern of rationality within their own mindframe. As alien as they are, they all seek a common purpose to survive. The titular Xeelee even had enough compassion to save as many baryonic races as possible. Even for the Photino Birds, one can argue that they are terraforming the entire multiverse so that their own offspring can survive without any intentional malice. If anything, it is the humans and lesser aliens like the Qax that are depicted as the utterly depraved ones.
  • On the flipside, the Sequence also heavily deconstruct the Humans Are Warriors trope. The ICoG and the Transcendence, two of the most well known and successful human polities, are treated as utterly unhinged, self-destructive and tyrannical. The Sequence is what happens when one use that trope and drive it to its own logical conclusion. Children are expended as disposable flesh to the meat grinder. Girls from Mars are turned into Breeding Slaves. Any and all forms of resources and ingenuity are wasted on war, causing societal stagnation. All aspects of human joy and happiness are erased including the concept of family. Entire human sub-species are bred to commit mass suicide. The Sequence shows that such a trope is nihilistic in its inherent self-destructive nature that should never, ever be praised.
• Genre Shift: Unlike every other Xeelee story, Coalescent is a work of historical fiction instead of a distant-future high-concept space opera; it is mostly set in the dying days of the Western Roman Empire and has little science fiction elements until the end.
• Ghost City: In 2047, declining birth rates in many countries have turned formerly bustling cities into near-ghost towns, as shown by Seville, which is visited by Michael Poole halfway through Transcendent.
• Global Warming: Earth in the 2040s is a world drastically diminished. Global warming has raised sea levels drastically and shifted climates around the world, devastating the biosphere and displacing entire nations.
• A God Am I: The Black Ghost compares itself to the Silver Ghosts' Destroyer god of old.
• God Is Good: The Transcendence's ultimate purpose is to redeem any and all forms of human suffering that has ever existed, could’ve existed, or possibly will exist. Deconstructed as even the slightest moment of discomfort any single human experiences in any timeline causes unfathomable mental agony for the Transcendence, so it comes to the conclusion that it must ensure humanity never existed to begin with, to spare every human timeline possible pain.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The Friends of Wigner's plan to send a message to the Ultimate Observer involves turning Jupiter into a black hole, shaping the singularity at its heart and loading it with information. The Friends want the Observer to select a chosen history to favour humanity — in particular, to pick out a causal line that would not include the Qax Occupation. Of course their scheme was overcomplicated, and it didn't work: the Friends didn't even manage to make their black hole properly, let alone send their plea to the end of time. They managed to destroy Jupiter, though, and in response the Qax begin the Extirpation that wipe clean the history of humanity and Earth itself.
• Groin Attack: In Coalescent, Marcus does this to himself to atone for his crime of cheating his wife. He doesn't survive long after.
• Grim Up North: To the Romano-British in Coalescent, the north is an uncivilised land, home to the Pictish barbarians.
• Guardian of the Multiverse: The Xeelee view themselves as the foremost protector of the material multiverse. They are called the Baryonic Lords for a reason.
• Hand Cannon: An extremely absurd example. Hell, propably the most extreme example in all of fiction. But when your Big Bang rifles are treated like pellet guns, you know you're in for a doozy. But by far the most infamous example is the first ilteration of Star Breakers, which were essentially pistol-sized weapons that can blow up a star.
• Heavy Worlder: The human colonists on the Rustball evolved a squat, short body plan with thick, powerful limbs to adapt to their new home's strong gravity.
• Hero Antagonist: Though they are presented as antagonists in the stories set during the Third Expansion era, the Silver Ghosts and the Xeelee don't seek to destroy humanity and only fights the humans because of aggression instigated by the absolutely xenophobic Coalition. And in the case of the Xeelee, it is revealed that all the time, the Coalition was fighting an enemy that actually wanted to save them, since the Xeelee's ultimate goal was to provide a way for baryonic species to escape from the Photino Birds and the doomed universe.
• Heroic Sacrifice: The first Ghost encountered by a human chooses to sacrifice itself to save the human character.
  • Deconstructed in Coalescent. Members of the Order sacrifice their lives or freedom at various points to allow their community to survive, but this is revealed as being an act of self-preservation on the part of a Hive Mind, where individuals are expendable as long as the genetic heritage survives. Towards the end of the novel, the question is implicitly asked whether regular humans sacrificing themselves for a nation or an organisation really is that different.
• Higher-Tech Species: The Xeelee are an extreme example. Despite being "only" this trope (because their universe-shattering technology is recognizable as such), they could absolutely run rings around quite a few examples of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens from other works.
  • How high-tech? To put it into perspective, humanity at one point controls multiple galaxies and has a superweapon that literally uses neutron stars as ammunition. They use this in an assault on the Xeelee, and the Xeelee's response can be summed up as "Cut that out, humanity. We're a little busy right now."
• Historical Domain Character: Two Roman emperors, Romulus Augustus and Constans II, alongside Pope Clement VII, make a brief appearance in Coalescent.
• Historical Hero Upgrade: In-Universe. The Seer and the Silverman refers to Joens Wyman investing in the Susy drive, but after the test case, he got bankrupt, suggesting him as an innovative, heroic figure wronged by how things turned out. In fact, from reading The Quagma Datum (which takes place 199 years before), we know Wyman was a dick, and his financial ruin was a triumphant climax of the story, turning the tables on the callous, amoral fatcat.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: Happens in-universe to:
  • Jasoft Parz, the human ambassador to the Qax occupation regime. In life, he works to moderate the bleak fact of Qax rule into a livable arrangement for as many humans as possible and contributes to thwarting the Qax when they travel back in time to AD 3717 and invade the Solar System. After the end of the Occupation, the word 'jasoft' came to be used by the new human regime to refer to traitors who must be purged.
  • The Silver Ghosts, from the point of view of the Engineers, are a group of humans who escaped being enslaved by the Qax by dwelling between the stars in rafts made from spacecraft, where a small number of Silver Ghosts settled. The Coalition later came, suppressed the Engineer culture, and maltreated the Ghosts living there, ultimately starting the Ghost-Coalition war, during which the Engineer raft worlds were caught in the crossfire and mostly destroyed. Their descendants blame the Ghosts for destroying their ancient home, even if it was Coalition policy that precipitated the crisis in the first place.
• Hive Caste System:
  • The Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins is a hive of eusocial humans who have evolved into distinct castes. Boys in the Order are more or less the same as normal humans, but they are outnumbered by girls and usually leave the Order if not gay. Most girls are sterile, never reach puberty, do all of the Order's work and maintain a childlike physiology well into adulthood; if a girl does undergo puberty, she develops a spermatheca and spends the rest of her life producing three or four children per year non-stop from menarche to death (which is possible since Order matres only need 13 weeks to carry a baby to term and never undergo menopause).
  • The Interim Coalition of Governance's Archive, located inside Olympus Mons, is a eusocial hive, home to a vast number of specialised castes: archivists, who have big heads, are much younger and age a lot faster than normal humans; runners, who can run faster and longer but live shorter lives; mechanics, who have long legs to allow them to reach tall places and reach distances faster; drones, normal sterile females that do the menial work; and breeders, perpetually pregnant and always seen floating in some sort of milky liquid.
• Hive Mind: All Squeem are linked into a mass mind. So the death of a single Squeem affected the totality, but only in a minor way, as the loss of a single neurone from a human brain wouldn’t even be noticed.
• Hobbes Was Right: This is Hobbes Was Right in literature form. The longest human civilizations are ones so brutal and monstrous it gives the Daleks a run for their money. Every human have proven to be self-serving, backstabbing, egotistical and megalomaniacal cunts of the highest order when push comes to shove. Humans are viewed as childish, petulant, petty and instinctively tribal and xenophobic to the point that any attempts at democracy would end up falling apart due to various external and internal factors unique to human sociology.
• Hoist by Their Own Petard: Thank you so much for discharging the star-disrupting gun right next to your own sun, Qax!
• Hollywood Tactics: The Interim Coalition of Governance seeks to counter the blatant Xeelee qualitative superiority with numbers and making suicide rushes, billions dying each year for thousands of years to achieve fractional gains. The inefficiencies and stupidity of the Coalition is one of the main points of Exultant. This is a group that thought reviving trench warfare like manual charges would be a good point.
• Homeworld Evacuation: The liberation of Earth from Qax rule was caused when Jim Bolder fires the starbreaker gun at the Qax homeworld's sun, forcing them to abandon Earth and try to save as many individuals as possible before their world burns.
• Hopeless War: Humans stand no chance against the Xeelee, just like how the Xeelee have no hope of defeating the photino birds — in fact, with time travel, they can barely escape the Photino Birds, after many resets..
• Horse of a Different Color: In Gravity Dreams, the space whales are seen used as mounts by a group of barbarians.
• Hostile Terraforming: The Photino Birds are this on a universal scale: they engineer every single star in the universe, shortening their lifespan by billions of years, in order to make the universe more suitable for themselves.
• Human Resources: On the Mayflower generation ship, all dead human bodies are recycled for raw materials, since on such a closed-out environment, burial, cremation or other ways of Due to the Dead are luxuries that cannot be afforded.
• Humans Are Divided: Humans are the only race that fight their kinsmen on a regular basis.
• Human Architecture Horror: Whatever happened to the Mayflower II, the Boneys or any transhuman societies that lived in the Coalescents are this.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: It is hard to consider the Coalition as anything but gigantic bastards of the Third Expansion. They murdered every single piece of sapient life they came across that was not human. The Silver Ghosts and the Xeelee have no interest in fighting the humans, but they stand in the path of humanity’s expansion.
• Humans Are Warriors: Heavily, heavily subverted, at least when it comes to depicting this trope in a positive light. Once the "Interim Coalition of Governance" comes into power. The Xeelee outclass Humans in pretty much every sphere of technology, but the Fantastic Racism of Mankind's "Third Expansion" era doesn't let a little thing like that stand in the way of galactic conquest. Humanity has never been depicted to be heroic as the Sequence brutally exposes what this trope is like to its own logical conclusion. Rather than some noble, badass action heroes, the human race is depicted as jingoistic, savage, vicious, petty barbarians no better than vermin. If anything, humanity is viewed as utterly pathetic in the grand scheme of things as exemplified by how quickly the human race collapsed once a common enemy leaves the galaxy; fighting over scraps of power. A line in Exultant expresses humanity's wasteful savagery as such:
  To the Xeelee, we were little more than rats — so that's what we became. Tenacious, relentless, swarming; fighting an interstellar war with teeth and nails.
• Humans Through Alien Eyes: Half of The Sun-People is told from the point of view of a Toolmaker alien whose homeworld is first visited by the humans during the story. The alien refers to humans as the 'Sun-people', bizarre, otherworldly and seemingly destructive creatures that ultimately turn out to be benevolent.
• Human Subspecies:
  • In Flux, humans have been modified to microscopic lifeforms to live within a Neutron Star.
  • In the turbulent centuries between Regina's time and ours, the Order keeps itself hidden and so separate that natural selection has the time and the opportunity to take effect, and the Order's members are nudged onto a divergent evolutionary path. Over time, living in the dark, the society develops a hypersensitivity to pheromones. Space is strictly limited, so the right to bear children is tightly controlled; delayed puberty becomes a desireable trait, as does adaptation for bearing multiple children at once. The same traits are observed in workers and queens, in eusocial species.
• Hypocrite: According to the Druz Doctrines, the official ideology of the Interim Coalition of Governance, unmodified humans are the best, humans should not use Anti-Senescence technology or any other useful self-modification they could do that would make the war easier and life better. The top ranks of the regime are total hypocrites about the Druz Doctrine, using extensive cybernetic modification, making themselves immortal while banning it for everybody else, and actively making use of immortal pharaohs, eusocial transhumans and alien symbionts.
• I Did What I Had to Do: From the point of view of the Gemo Cana, she accepts that in helping the Qax with their Extirpation the pharaohs are doing violence to the past, but insists on the need to collaborate, to destroy all records, to be able to keep a continuity through their memory that will enable further independence and defiance.
• I'm a Humanitarian: On the Mayflower, the subhuman descendants of the long-lived Autarchs turn to cannibalism after breeding immortality into themselves and no longer seeing children as a way to preserve their genes, but simply as food.
• Immortality Immorality: The increased intelligence and longevity of the pharaohs come along with callousness, a ruthless push to do whatever it takes to serve power or hold onto power yourself, all under the justification that this will provide greater insight to guide humanity's future. Yet such justifications ring hollow, as it's not the schemes of the pharaohs that ends Qax rule, any more than it's the Friends of Wigner. Instead it's Jim Bolder's rash, daring, individual subversion of the system that succeeds, while in the following eras, the immortals, the pragmatists, help perpetuate destructive patterns of domination that last far longer than alien rule.
• Implacable Man: The single Xeelee Nightfighter in Vengence doesn’t appear even to notice that the entirety of humanity’s resources are being thrown at it at least until human invent monopole cannons several thousand years earlier than they acquire them in the main series. Those don’t stop it either but do manage to make it react.
• Insufficiently Advanced Alien: The Hive Mind Starfish Aliens known as the Squeem conquer Earth, despite being no more intelligent and not much older than humans, because they lucked out on finding technology left over from the sufficiently advanced Xeelee.
• In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: The Qax invoke this trope to homogenise humanity as part of their Extirpation to erase human culture and history.
• King Bob the Nth: The Empire of Sol is ruled by a dynasty of empresses all named Shira; the Empress during the events of Starfall is Shira XXXII. In truth there's no dynasty, mother or daughter here: all the Empresses are the same person, Shira, the Friend of Wigner trapped in the past, as shown in Timelike Infinity.
• Large and in Charge: The Black Ghost is twice to three times as big as its minions.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia:
  • Michael Poole erases the events of his destruction of the Titan ecosystem from the memory of Miriam Berg, who opposed the act, to keep her quiet.
  • After the Squeem temporarily freeze all of Earth's water, killing many humans and nearly sterilising the oceans in the process, they engineer a virus to erase all memory of this event from all humans. They mostly succeeded; all but one human come out of it believing the oceans have always been depleted of life.
• Lensman Arms Race: The Xeelee use cosmic strings to build a wormhole (dubbed by humans as "Bolder's Ring") in order to escape into another universe. The Ring is so massive that it's gravity well is pulling in galaxies from all directions towards it at high speed. The Xeelee's antagonists one up on this by meticulously arranging galaxies around the Ring in just the right pattern to form a gravitational resonance that will shake the Ring apart.
• Life in Zero G: The inhabitants of the generation ship Nord have slim bodies, arms only a little shorter than legs, and long toes, not as long as fingers but capable of grasping and manipulation — a body built for zero gravity.
• Living Relic: Following the Qax occupation, this is the argument used by the pharaohs (humans who collaborated with the Qax and were gifted immortality in return) to dissuade the new human government from killing them: they have become the last keepers of the history and lore of humanity and the planet Earth, which were largely erased during the Qax's Extirpation.
  Gemo Cana: Everything humans know about the Xeelee today, every bit of intelligence we have, was preserved by the pharaohs. I refuse to plead with you for my life. But I am concerned that you should understand. We pharaohs were not dynastic tyrants. We fought, in our way, to survive the Qax Occupation, and the Extirpation. For we are the wisdom and continuity of the race. Destroy us and you complete the work of the Qax for them, finish the Extirpation. Destroy us and you destroy your own past — which we preserved for you, at great cost to ourselves.
• Living Ship: The Spline are immense, space-faring creatures who engineer themselves to be spacecraft and then hire themselves out to other species.
• Longevity Treatment: Anti-Senescence technology repairs genetic damage due to age via nanobots. The treatment has a 99% success rate, though failures typically end with a terminal illness. Lifespan with AS treatments theoretically has no upper limit, though in practice the treatments begin to break down at 400-500 years.
• Long-Lived: No pharaoh is truly immortal; it's just that they couldn't foresee a time when they would die, and count their lives in tens of millennia or more. The most enduring of them, Luru Parz, lives for nearly 1 million years.
• Long-Lost Relative: George Poole only learns about the existence of his twin sister Rosa when he's 45 years old, after his father's death.
• The Lost Lenore: Lora, the girlfriend of Rusel, protagonist of Mayflower II. When the Coalition forces reach their home, he is chosen to escape on a generation ship and she is forced to stay behind to be killed, but he never stops thinking about her for the rest of the story.
• Luke Nounverber: The primitive people of the jungle on the Great Northern have names like Arrow Maker, Spinner-of-Rope, Trapper-of-Toads and Painter-of-Faces.
• Mad God: The Transcendence ultimately desires to erase all suffering in the past, thereby ensuring that every human that could have existed does so. But since this is seen as too great a task, the Transcendence is prepared to reach back in time and stop humans from ever existing, thereby "erasing" the suffering that they intend to redeem. Now that's a messed up god.
• Make Wrong What Once Went Right: Xeelee: Vengeance takes place in an Alternate Timeline created when a Xeelee from after the war goes back in time with the intent on taking out humanity in general and Michael Poole in particular.
• Mama Bear: Regina in the Roman-era plot of Coalescent is this to her daughter Brica, including killing a Saxon looter who attempts to rape Brica. Later in her life, she essentially becomes this to the entire Order.
• Man Bites Man: Borno resorts to biting the Black Ghost after all of his crew's weapons turn out to be useless against this creature. It actually works.
• Mean Boss: After they are sent to the Belt for mining labour, the scientists are supervised by Roch, a huge, half-mad troublemaker and alcoholic. He doesn't waste any time making life hell for them.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: By the time of The Siege of Earth, many old machines abandoned by humans have evolved by themselves and formed rich ecologies.
• Meet the New Boss: The day-to-day life of the drones of Conurbation 2473 changes little after the overthrow of the Qax and the three changes in regime — Qax to bandits to Green Guard to Million Heroes — over a year after that. One set of rulers was much the same as another, and the series of ugly power struggles and material erosion makes many people genuinely miss the days of Qax rule.
• Mental Fusion: The Transcendence, the emergent gestalt of a collective consciousness with billions of posthumans. This collective consciousness is made from individuals but they are not overwhelmed by the greater whole and maintain their individuality.
• Merged Reality: The Restoration plan of the Transcendence is to have merge every possible timeline into a single universe so that any and all possible humans will exist in this single universe regardless of logic.
• The Migration: The theme of The Baryonic Lords: the migration of the last humans from their dying Pocket Dimension to Bolder's Ring and there to another universe that can sustain life.
• Mile-Long Ship: The Xeelee Nightfighter has "wings" that stretch out for kilometers, though the cabin is rather small.
• A Million Is a Statistic: Pirius lampshades this trope after losing two of his close comrades:
  And how could he feel so anguished about the loss of two privates, when, if you added up all the losses around the Front, ten billion died every year? It made no sense, and yet it hurt even so.
• Monumental Damage: Stonehenge is mostly lost in space near the end of Timelike Infinity, except for a single megalith which becomes a satellite of Jupiter.
• More Dakka: The Coalition dumped so much firepower into the Galactic Core that it glowed bright pink and could be seen tens of thousands of light years away. Given that these are the same nutjobs that have hand-held Big Bang assault rifles, is anyone surprise?
• Moving Buildings: The buildings made of Xeelee construction material on Goober c are capable of uprooting and moving to avoid danger.
• The Multiverse: The universe floats in a greater space, called the Bulk, of many extra dimensions. There are many universes floating parallel to each other in the Bulk, like pages in a book. These other universes can be reached through engineering, like wormholes.
• Multiversal Conqueror: What the Photino Birds end up doing in the end.
• The Mutiny: In AD 415, the Roman soldiers stationed on Hadrian's Wall, having received no pay for five years after the Roman withdrawal from Britain, rebel against and kill their commander Aetius.
• Mutual Kill: Borno's desperate attempt to bite the Black Ghost successfully creates an opening for Hex to kill it, although he doesn't survive the attack.
• Mutually Assured Destruction: In the primordial universe, there were wars between matter-based and antimatter-based life, but they were always so devastating that mutual deterrence became the only option.
• My Future Self and Me: If you grow up in a Green Navy base, meeting your own future self was no big deal. The whole point of the place is that from birth you are trained to fly FTL starships (or, in other words, time machines). Most people figure out that that means there might come a day when you would meet a copy of yourself from the future — or the past, depending which end of the transaction you look at it from.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: Unlike any of its kind, the Black Ghost is a Silver Ghost that fights like humans, with a militaristic hierarchy that proves dangerously capable of fighting humans, using new weapons, tactics and forms of organisation that threaten to turn the tide of battle.
• Negative Space Wedgie: Constructed and weaponised. Both the Xeelee and the Photino Birds fire topological defects of space-time including cosmic strings, singularity lasers and weaponised galaxies.
• Never Found the Body: Amator is last seen staying on the surface of Rome before the Vandalic hordes come and sack the city. He is never seen or heard of again after that.
• The Night That Never Ends: At the end of Vengeance, Earth is moved into a new orbit in the Oort Cloud, where the sunlight is a million times as dim. Harry Poole even uses this exact phrase when describing the situation.
• No Dead Body Poops: Implied aversion in Raft. One character sees "a shape hanging from rope" and "a pool of something brown and thick" beneath it.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: When a battle turns to disaster for the Coalition forces, Pirius chooses to risk survival instead of following his orders to stand to fight and die pointlessly, in the process capturing a Xeelee nightfighter for the first time in history. Rather than being lauded as a hero, he is court-martialed for disobeying orders.
• Nom de Mom: In the Poole clan, a tradition that lasts for many generations is that children inherit their mother's Poole surname — both Michael Pooles took the surname from their mothers Gina Poole and Muriel Poole.
• No Name Given: The only aliens that have names are the relatively unimportant Toolmakers (in The Sun-People), Cilia-of-Gold (in the short story of the same name) and the mummy-cows in the Photino Victory stories. Other individual aliens are always referred to by their species, or a title if said alien is particularly important (the Qax governor, the Black Ghost, the Ambassador to the Heat Sink,...).
• Non-Indicative Name: The "Interim Coalition of Governance" actually rules humanity for an "interim" period over 20,000 years long.
• Nothing Left to Do but Die: Michael Poole’s final fate in the Distant Finale of Ring, having seen the Photino Birds bring about the end of the universe, commits suicide via falling into a neutron star.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Late in Exultant, This Burden Must Pass, a member of the Friends of Wigner cult, has a chat with the Silver Ghost, and people point out a lot of similarity between their world views, but very different implications, with the Ghosts seeking to proactively fix their broken universe, while the Friends are ultimately about acceptance, waiting to be rescued.
• Obliviously Evil: The photino birds set out to transform all stars into white dwarfs, which would cause the eventual extinction of all baryonic life forms, including humans. Despite having goals that are hostile to us, photino birds do not seem to be malevolent. In fact, they are most likely unaware that there are baryonic life forms (apart from the Xeelee, who figured out that intense gravity can affect them and so drawing their notice), because their own form prevents them from noticing us at all or realising that the ageing of stars has unfortunate effects to the baryonic universe. Any attempt to communicate them was fruitless.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: The Coalition is your typical bastion of entrenched, institutionalised mediocrity in which someone might actually be punished for figuring out how to win a war. Thematically, it's a reductio ad absurdum of much that goes on in modern-day politics. Nearly everyone on the top is hypocritical, short-sighted, repulsive, fears change, and is more interested in holding to their power more than anything else. It is necessary to see how the decision to launch the special weapons project comes about, and a large part of the point of Exultant is how human institutions prove more of a barrier than even the physical challenges of engineering an instantaneous computer and black hole weapons.
• Older Than They Look: Anti-Senescence treatment makes it difficult to determine the true age of a human.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. There are two characters named Julia (the mother and one of the granddaughters of Regina), two named George Poole (one of the protagonists of Coalescent, and his ancestor who lived in the 16th century), two named Michael Poole (the protagonist of Transcendent and his descendant who appears in Timelike Infinity and Ring; the former is usually called Michael Poole Bazalget when he needs to be distinguished from his more famous descendant) and two named Lora (the girlfriend of Rusel in Mayflower II and the crush of the eponymous protagonist of PeriAndry's Quest).
• Other Me Annoys Me: The two versions of Pirius do not get along well with each other.
• Our Gods Are Different: The monads, eternal, abstract beings which create each Universe in turn and then sleep through the lifespan of each Universe inside black holes. They can create universes with a stupendous amount of dimensions, and the entire story is just part of their dreams. Baxter remarks that they care nothing for humans, or quagmites, or Xeelee, or photino birds.
• Our Vampires Are Different: The bloodsuckers are out-of-control Martian Virtuals that learned to steal something far more precious to any Virtual than blood: processor time. There are rules that unnecessary programmes are eventually shut down, but the bloodsuckers can integrate other Virtuals into their own programming and steal their ration of processor capacity.
• Outliving One's Offspring: The Qax's gift of immortality to the pharaohs was ambiguous: they don't breed true and have to watch their children die, if their growth isn't stunted as an infant.
• Parental Incest: Their shared blood doesn't stop MacoFeri from siring a child on his own daughter.
• People Farms:
  • The army of the Interim Coalition of Governance commands vast birthing crèches to ensure a steady supply of infantrymen. These children are grown in clutches of hundreds and taught the Druz Doctrines to an almost cellular level, ensuring loyalty and every single one of them is trained to kill a variety of aliens in the most efficient way possible.
  • The Black Ghost plans to breed a group of captive humans to serve as laboratory animals. Too bad this plan never leaves the concept stage.
  • The humans of Old Earth are not the owners of the sentient Weapon machines. The Weapons are farming them like livestock.
• Persecuted Intellectuals: In Raft, the scientists on the Raft are sent to the Belt to do hard labour after the working class revolts against them and the officers.
• Plant Aliens: One of the indigenous lifeforms of the alternate universe where Raft takes place is a species of mobile floating trees.
• Plot-Triggering Death: Each narrative of Coalescent is kicked off by a death: the Roman narrative by the death of Marcus (along with the abandonment of Britain by The Roman Empire), which forces Regina to move from her family villa; and the modern narrative by the death of George Poole's father, which indirectly causes him to find out the existence of a long-lost sister and begin the search for her.
• Pocket Dimension: After their defeat by the Xeelee, the human race are locked away in a vast hypersphere bigger on the inside than on the outside, and imprisoned within an artificial world.
• Poor Communication Kills: Humans start a massive war with Xeelee because they believe that the Ring is intended to wreck the Universe. Unforunately, they discover too late that it's actually a wormhole created by the Xeelee as the only way for baryonic life to escape extinction at the hands of the unstoppable Photino Birds. Similarly, the Photino Birds are so alien that they most likely do not even realise that they are wiping out untold numbers of species in the process of making the Universe more comfortable for themselves.
• Population Control: On the Nord, you are allowed two children at the maximum. If you have any more, one of the existing ones must leave the ship.
• Post-Peak Oil: In the 2040s, the depletion of fossil fuels and desperate efforts to contain further environmental damage has made the average person dramatically less mobile, with automobiles a memory, air travel a luxury of the ultra-privileged.
• The Power of Hate: Say what you will about the Coalition, the Transcendence and the Qax, but their absolute species-wide hatred among one another and against other aliens allowed them to somehow survive in ages beyond the lifespan of most Sci-Fi factions. Seriously, the Daleks would be taken aback on how completely bonkers that the power of racist hatred in the Xeelee Sequence could persist for so long.
• Protagonist Journey to Villain: Reality Dust details an incident involving reality dust and Pharaohs on Callisto that causes Hama Druz to turn from an abstract-minded bureaucrat into the insane ideologue whose demented 'humans as vicious vermin' philosophy fuels the atrocities of the Coalition and plagues humanity for twenty thousand years.
• Propaganda Machine: The Coalition's Ministry of Public Enlightenment is basically this series' equivelent of the Ministry of Truth.
• Public Domain Character: A post-Roman British warlord named Artorius and his genius friend Myrddin make an appearance in the Roman narrative of Coalescent. After Artorius' death, the despairing British are left with nothing but legends of how he's not dead, but sleeping, his mighty sword Chalybs at his side.
• The Quisling: Jasoft Parz, the human ambassador to the Qax occupation regime. He was never loyal to the invaders, and actually betrays them when they go back in time 1500 years to invade the Earth in the past, but he's still seen in a negative light by almost all humans of the later eras.
• Ramming Always Works: When every weapon the humans have at their disposal fail to move the Xeelee Probe hurtling towards Earth by any meaningful distance, Michael Poole resorts to ramming his ship (except for the lifedome) into it. Unfortunately, even the force of a GUT drive isn't enough to scratch the Probe's shell made from Xeelee construction material.
• Rapid Aging: During her brief life as a human, Lieserl's body is engineered by nanobots that cause her to age rapidly. Memories and learning are also implanted into her cortex. The combination of these effects results in Lieserl living the equivalent of a 90-year life in 90 days.
• Reality Warper: The "Snowmen" technology used to protect Earth in the short story "The Siege of Earth" (from Resplendent) seems to at least border on this.
• Recursive Precursors: The very first of them are the spacetime-defect creatures (ancestors of the Xeelee), who dominated the universe during the grand unification epoch, which ended 10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang. After them came the quark-gluon based lifeforms, who flourished during the first millionth of a second of the universe. And finally there are the quagmites, who lived for thirty times that period before another cosmic transition lets baryonic life like humans inherit the universe.
• Red Baron: The Xeelee are called the Baryonic Lords, for a good reason. And woe befall to any poor sod not named the Photino Birds who accidentally ended up pissing off the Lords of all Baryonic Matter.
• Red Sky, Take Warning: One of the indicators that the nebula in Raft needs to be evacuated.
• Relationship Sabotage: Regina twice tries to get rid of her daughter Brica's budding romances, first with the Farm Boy Bran and then with the blacksmith apprentice Galba until she's satisfied with her third boyfriend, the Roman freeman Castor.
• The Remnant: After each universal mass extinction, small enclaves of the survivors would survive in one manner or another, witnessing the universe becoming progressively colder and slower.
• The Republic: In The Sun-People, which is set in AD 3672 during humanity's early expansion, it is directly assumed that the human incursions into the asteroid where the story happens will automatically halt when it comes into conflict with other, and vulnerable, intelligent life. That, combined with the sketched out detail of an array of governments and institutions to be navigated, give a very different feeling from the stories set under the totalitarian, xenophobic, rapacious human regimes in the later eras.
• Retcon:
  • There's some inconsistencies across the series, mainly between the earlier novels and the Destiny's Children books. Some of it is simply the result of a lot more light being shed on the period between the fall of the Qax and the end of Ring, but (for example) the fact that Xeelee-style FTL drives function as time machines, including the ability to create paradoxes is only revealed in Exultant, when one would have expected it to be mentioned earlier.
  • In The Xeelee Flower (the very first story written in the series), the Xeelee seem like an advanced species somewhat similar to humans, having buildings, doors, rooms, handguns, and nightfighters have tiny hand-operated control panels. Later books (from Exultant onward) depict them as eldritch beings totally bound up with their technology (part spacetime defect symbiotes) such that one can't really distinguish between themselves and their technology.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: The construction of a Qax conurbation takes place in just minutes.
• Rock Beats Laser: Despite the extent of the Silver Ghosts' reworking of their physical environment (they frequently toy with the laws of physics to advance their own knowledge), they ultimately lose against the humans, who manage to survive and kill through savage innovation.
• Rock Monster: The colonists of the desert planet Baynix II ditched their carbon-based bodies for slower silicon models which leave them resembling motionless, man-shaped monoliths.
• Rule of Cool: Celestial bodies up to and including entire galaxies used as projectiles? Megastructures millions of light years across? Handguns that can destroy stars? Aliens altering the value of Planck's constant simply in order to build a faster computer? Stephen Baxter was rocking this trope before it was mainstream.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: When the humans attack the Xeelee from the Chandra black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, the Xeelee abandon the black hole because the method that the humans are using to attack them is potentially causing damage to the black hole itself and the monads inside.
• Sci-Fi Horror: The Sequence is one of the darkest science-fiction stories ever told, this is to be expected.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Heavily, HEAVILY subverted. Stephen Baxter is one of the few Sci-Fi writers who actually understands the concept of scale and the Sequence sure encapsulates the sheer vastness of space.
• Scry vs. Scry: Humanity fights a War against the Xeelee over the Milky Way Galaxy where both sides can send information backwards in time using FTL. In practice, neither side can ever get an advantage. This goes on for tens of thousands of years.
• Secret-Keeper: Harry Gage, hidden away from the Squeem when they conduct their operation to erase all memory of their freezing of the oceans that killed many humans and species, emerges as the sole person who remembers the event. He becomes the first Rememberer, and after his death his successors continue to keep and pass this knowledge until the discovery of a Squeem holdout in the Solar System, and the last Rememberer decides it's time to reveal it.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes: The second level of the Transcendence's Witnessing is Hypostatic Union: not just watching the subject but experiencing everything they experience. Through Hypostatic Union the Transcendence can go through the thoughts and experiences of anyone, even dead people.
• Self-Duplication: Each photino bird is a perfect copy of its parent.
• Self-Made Orphan: Teeg takes great pride at the moment when he killed his neglectful father, a Foron noble (implied to be MacoFeri) who had raped his mother, a servant.
• Sequel Hook:
  • Timelike Infinity ends with a cryptically-described paragraph introducing an unknown character, which ends up being a setup for Ring:
    And then— There was a box, drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled. From around an impossible corner a human walked into the box. A rope woven of bark trailed behind him, out of sight. The human was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost. He stared out at the stars, astonished. Michael's extended awareness stirred. Something had changed... History resumed.
  • Formidable Caress (supposedly the very last story in chronological order) also ends with one paragraph which claims that the story hasn't ended yet (and eventually ends up continued in Vengeance):
    Even after the Xeelee had finally won their war against humanity, the stars continued to age, too rapidly. The Xeelee completed their great Projects and fled the cosmos. Time unravelled. Dying galaxies collided like clapping hands. But even now the story was not yet done. The universe itself prepared for another convulsion, greater than any it had suffered before. And then— "Who are you?" "My name is Michael Poole."
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The Xeelee Nightfighter in Vengeance appears to be doing this (in typical Xeelee fashion it doesn’t ever bother to communicate its goals or justification to the humans) to prevent the mass extinction event caused by humanity exterminating all alien races it encounters during the third expansion in the main timeline by annihilating humanity before it can leave its home system. Remarkably, once the human survivors understand this in Redemption a significant faction of them agree that the Xeelee attack was justified.
• Shadow Archetype: Averted with the "Anti-Xeelee", since its name actually refers to the fact it travels backwards in time, like some anti-particles are theorized to do. The antagonists of the Xeelee, the Photino Birds, fit.
• Shout-Out: One of the simulations enacted by Martian Virtuals during the events of Xeelee: Vengeance is named 'Barsoom', and involves mostly naked, red-skinned, egg-laying human-like beings, apparently based on the works of a certain Discovery-era (read: 20th century) author. Sounds familiar?
• Shown Their Work: When the author of the series has a degree in mathematics and engineering, this is bound to happen. Although a few of the theoretic physics is now outdated (i.e. Great Attractor) and paleontology not being Baxter's strong suit. Overall, the series still holds up incredibly well; from how time travel works, to how dimensions should properly behave via quantum mechanics. The Sequence is still chock full of applied and theoretical physics on both the very small and the very big.
• Silicon-Based Life:
  • On Titan, Michael Poole and Miriam Berg find life based on silicon-silicon bonds between silanol molecules dissolved in liquid ethane, and ammono life, based on chemical bonds between carbon and nitrogen-hydrogen chemical groups rather than carbon-oxygen, using ammonia as its solvent rather than water.
  • A group of human colonists on a silicon-rich world (visited in Transcendent) encountered indigenous silicon-based life, abandoned their carbon-chemistry medium and chose to download their children into the silicon.
• Single-Biome Planet: The homeworld of the Qax is a swamp planet, covered from pole to pole by an ocean.
• Slave Race: After the humans overthrow the Squeem occupation, they bring the fight to the Squeem home system and subjugate their former overlords, who are only allowed to live due to their usefulness as symbionts for humans.
• Son of an Ape: By the time of Exultant humanity has converted almost the entirety of the Milky Way into an industrial war machine with which they are engaging in a multi-millenial pan-galactic campaign against the Xeelee. Still, the Xeelee view this as roughly the equivalent of an especially persistent cockroach infestation, and think of humanity as little more than pond life.
• The Social Darwinist: The Coalition is an extreme example. The primary goals of Hama Druz is to make humans stay as human. To do so requires a level of genetic surviellence on an extreme, totalitarian end. Nevermind the mass xenocides, just the human factor of the Coalition would make the likes of the Imperium of Man look like progressive hippies because at least the Imperium tolerates Abhumans and Transhumans. The Coalition view ALL human offshoots as abominations worthy of neither pity nor mercy.
• Space Age Stasis: The Coalition regime embraces stagnation to preserve human continuity, avoiding political and even most technological change. The imperative commitment to total war stagnates human physical and intellectual evolution. The Druz Doctrines do not encourage exploration or research, and very little effort is directed toward projects without an immediate and conspicuous benefit to maintaining the massive logistics necessary to continue the Xeelee war. From hundreds of thousands of years later human historians note that the Coalition was freakish in how cohesive, unified and stagnant they were.
• Space Whale: The Spline are giant living armored spaceships that evolved from alien whales. They live off interstellar gas and other species use them as transports and warships. There are also more literal space whales that inhabit the alternate universe where Raft takes place.
• Stable Time Loop: It's eventually revealed that the Xeelee sent themselves back in time to supercharge their own development. Then it turns out the Photino Birds can go one better. They do this naturally and at will, even from the end of the universe back to the beginning.
• Starfish Aliens: Pretty much every single race in the series. There's almost nothing remotely human-like, aside from humanity's descendants— if then.
• Star Killing: The Xeelee starbreaker gun is aptly named indeed. This is also the goal of the photino birds, who seek to turn all stars in the universe into white dwarfs.
• The Stars Are Going Out:
  • Due to the photino birds' interference, the stars are aging far, far faster than they should, and in five million years — rather than 100 trillion — almost all the stars in the universe will become white dwarfs.
  • In Gravity Dreams (a sequel to Raft), the alternate dimension Beta's Stelliferous Era is coming to an end, and the humans stranded there need to be evacuated.
• Starter Villain: The Squeem, the first aliens that pose a true threat for the humans, manage to conquer the Solar System and enslave humanity for 51 years, but it later turns out that they are not especially intelligent or advanced, and are dependent on scavenged technology from the Xeelee, like the hyperdrive. After the overthrow of the Squeem, the humans gain access to Xeelee technology for the first time, which opens up a new expansion era, while the Squeem themselves become Demoted to Extra.
• State Sec: The Coalition have two.
  • The Guardians are the regular law enforcement. They make use of various robots and other technologies to protect Coalition interests. They also supply guards and security to the various Ministries, as well as ensuring that there are no human dissidents looking to cause the Coalition problems.
  • The Office of Doctrinal Responsibility is the Coalition’s ideological police, the equivelent of the Gestapo or the KGB. They are tasked with ensuring that the Druz Doctrines are enforced throughout human controlled space. It has agents throughout the galaxy and is always assigned to frontline units.
• Sex Slave: What happens to Subject Five on board a Silver Ghost experimental science ship. When she was a child, she was effectively gang-raped by several human samples. The Silver Ghosts merely watched. This could also apply to the women in the Mayflower II as well.
• Space Master: Both the Xeelee and Photino Birds can warp space like a child manipulating playdoh. You know you are worthy of such a title if a faction can create galaxy-sized cosmic strings (errors and defects of space-time itself) with absolute ease.
• Straw Nihilist: Harma Druz is this factored up to an eleven. The abovequote is one of the most nihilistic motto ever written in literature.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Xeelee are sufficiently mysterious in-universe that no one is sure what they really are. Though their actual power far exceeds many other examples that are the traditional sufficiently advanced aliens, in many of the earlier short stories the reader is given the impression they are normal biological lifeforms. This is simply because their godlike technology is still recognizable as such and uses comprehensible interfaces, if not comprehensible principles; they're a hyper-extreme example of Higher-Tech Species instead. However, there are indications that Bolder's impression of the Xeelee were retconned, or at the very least the Nightfighter he piloted was a second-hand cast off, like so much of Xeelee technology. In Exultant, it is revealed that the Xeelee are self-aware space-time constructs that have existed since very earliest moments of the universe.
• Suicide Attack: During the Squeem occupation of Earth, a human assassin, pumped full of Squeem-specific toxins and pathogens, jumps into the Squeem colony of Lake Superior laden with rocks, slits her own wrist and lets her blood fill the lake to exterminate the colony. Also considered a viable tactics for the Interim Coalition of Governance as they expect their child soldiers to die; so mass suicide charges or crashing their damaged fighters into the enemy is a given.
• Super Breeding Program: Garry Uvarov's eugenic program aims to improve the human stock by getting rid of late acting lethal genes, which normally could never be selected out of the gene pool because they only kill old bodies after they have reproduced. Uvarov orders his followers to live as hunter-gatherers in the sealed off forest, abandons Anti-Senescence treatments and bans reproduction before the age of 40, with this limit being steadily raised over the years. After eight centuries, the jungle folk's average lifespan goes up from 100 to 250, with the 80-year-old Arrow Maker being in the prime of life.
• Super-Persistent Predator: The Squeem missile sent to destroy an asteroid engineered by some humans to be an escape hatch off the occupied Solar System in Pilot. Among the pursuit, the missile adapts itself to accelerate faster, the humans have to modify their ship to do the same. This continues on, moving significant distances for what is millions of years outside due to time dilation. By the time they manage to crash the missile into a black hole, the humans have abandoned their physical forms, and Squeem rule over humanity has long since ended, that the chase continues past the point where there are probably any other humans still alive.
• Super Supremacist: The ancient ancestors of the Silver Ghosts were one group among their species who achieved spaceflight, left their homeworld, rarely came back and diverged from those who had stayed. Once the people who stayed summoned back the ur-Ghosts to help with an incoming crisis, they found themselves resenting having to aid a primitive, weaker form and began to see ways to exploit their own homeworld, ultimately leading to a civil war.
• Supervillain Lair: The HQ of the Black Ghost, a sphere black as night and kilometres across.
• The Symbiote: A Silver Ghost is a community of symbiotic creatures: an autarky, a miniature biosphere in its own right, all but independent of the universe outside.
• Taken for Granite: The microscopic aliens from Beta Pegasi are able to force carbon dioxide into a form of silicate-like rock that superficially resembles chalk.
• Tele-Frag: When the reality dust entities shifted Callisto virtually instantaneously a few thousand kilometres or so, a Xeelee was killed by being trapped under the ice (a method that seemed to act by both encasing the Xeelee in the ice and impaling it because Callisto suddenly occupied the same space the Xeelee was in).
• Terrible Trio: Out of universe, the Xeelee Sequence is considered as an equal to 1984 and I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream in terms of being the trifecta of Dystopias. If anything, these three literature pieces is sometimes debated on which is the most depressing, bleakest and nihilistic works ever written into fiction.
• That's No Moon: The humans mistake bunch of ur-Ghosts huddled together as a wall during their mission to assassinate the Black Ghost:
  The wall behind Hex's back suddenly gave way, and she was tipped onto the cold ground. When she looked up she saw that the "sandbags" were suspended in the thin air, heavy, rippling sacks swarming over her head. There must have been fifty of them, more. This "wall" had a been a reef of ur-Ghosts, huddled together.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: In a multiverse of high Kardashev IV civilizations, you can bet there are hand-held weapons that has more firepower than a Deathstar. You have pistol-sized 'construction equipment' that can make Stars go supernova to weaponized topological defects of space-time capable of bisecting weaponised galaxies like silly string. The factions of the Xeelee Sequence are not to be trifled with.
• Third Eye: The space whales of Beta have a total of three eyes.
• Time Abyss: The traitorous humans who collaboratorated with the alien who conquered Earth were given eternal life as a reward. They eventually begin to regret this.
  My name is Luru Parz. I was born in the year AD 5279, as humans once counted time. Now I have lived so long that such dates have no meaning. We have lost the years, lost them in orders of magnitude.
• Time Dilation: Frequently, due to the prevalence of ships that move close to the speed of light: the Great Northern is designed to undergo a journey that will take 1000 years for its crew to return to Earth in AD 5 million. In Old Earth, a world with stratified time, time runs faster the higher up you climb, leading to the longer-lived upper crust living at the bottom exploiting the (relatively) short-lived caste further up, and passes much more slowly than outside, so its inhabitants can live off the trickling geothermal heat of the Earth alone, to the point that the gaps between the stories are measured in hundreds of millions of years.
• Time Machine: Pretty much any vessel capable of traversing FTL is effectively a time machine. As the Sequence honours general relativity, travelling faster-than-light breaks causality. As such, any races that can travel FTL has in effect, an armada of timeships.
• Time Master: In a multiverse of time-travelling great power rivalries. The Xeelee and Photino Birds are both grandmasters of time. The only ones outside of the series that could compete with them on an equal basis are the goddamned Time Lords and Daleks.
• Time Skip:
  • The first part of Ring ends with the launch of the Great Northern in AD 3951. The second part starts after nearly a thousand subjective years on the ship, which equals five million years outside due to time dilation.
  • The Roman narrative of Coalescent starts in AD 410 and skips a few years every several chapters.
  • Each chapter of The Venus Generations take place a century after the previous one.
• Time Travel: The Sequence is THE quintessential hard sci-fi time travel epic with FTL-time machines and weaponised tactical and strategic foreknowledge. Numerous novels and shrot stories feature time travel as its central theme.
• To Serve Man:
  • Breeding Ground ends with the protagonist being consumed from inside-out by her Squeem symbiont.
  • In The Lowland Expedition, the living buildings of the unnamed city feed on the humans that stay inside them.
• Transhuman: The various species of Weaponised, modified from humans by scientists of the Integrality.
• Trapped in the Past: By the end of Timelike Infinity, Jasoft Parz and Shira, two humans from AD 5407, are trapped in AD 3717.
• Tree Vessel: In Raft, one of the strange lifeforms in the high-gravity universe is a species of mobile floating trees. Humans turn them into vessels and steer them through space.
• Tyke Bomb: The Coalition makes use of Child Soldiers, many of whom are grown in vats at the Front. Each of these children are taught the Druz Doctrines to an almost cellular level, ensuring loyalty to the cause and every single one of them is trained to kill a variety of aliens in the most efficient way possible. Every Child Soldier is sent into battle when they are ready, often with special augmentations to suit their job.
• Uncanny Valley: Rusel finds the inbred, savage descendants of the Autarchs, with their blank eyes and wizened-faced children, peculiarly disturbing.
• Un-person: The alien Qax attempt to do this to the entire history of humankind, in a project know as the "Extirpation", in order to make humans more docile slaves. The Coalition also does this to various dissidents on a constant basis and the Transcendence one-ups all of them by attempting to unperson the entire human race, as in, every single alternate reality of humans from every single existing and potential timelines from existence.
• The 'Verse: The entire collective series, including the spin-offs are called the Xeeleeverse.
• Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: The spindlings of Old Earth (which were originally aliens that were brought to Earth) have an inner skeletal structure but differ from native Earth tetrapods in one way: they have six legs. The creationists on the world uses this detail to justify their hypothesis (which is actually correct).
  Like most primitive cultures on the Shelf, you Forons cling to a naive naturalism! You believe that the world as we experience it emerged from the blind operation of natural laws, that intelligence had no hand in it. But that cannot be true. The spindling is proof that the world could not have developed organically; one counter-example is enough to demonstrate that nature lacks the necessary unity for that to be so. The simplest hypothesis is in fact that it has all been made, all shaped by intelligence, from blueshifted sky to redshifted Lowland.
• Vestigial Empire: The Roman narrative of Coalescent is set in Britain from AD 410 (the year the Romans withdrew from Britain) to AD 455, and in Rome from AD 455 (the date of the second Sack of Rome by the Vandals) to Regina's death in AD 476 (the end of the Western Roman Empire). The filth and decay of civilisation, the rapid decline of cities, withering of trade, decline of population and the loss of education and skills; or in other words, the rapid onset of the Dark Ages in just a couple of generations, is described in vivid detail.
• Vichy Earth: Earth is occupied twice by aliens, first by the Squeem from AD 4874 to AD 4925, and later by the Qax from AD 5088 to AD 5407.
• Villain Protagonist: The protagonists in The Ghost Pit are perhaps the vilest in the whole series. In other stories, the worst cruelty is done by child soldiers in pursuit of collective victory, it's appalling, but somewhat understandable, and don't seem as individually perverse. In this story we see the hunting down of the last Silver Ghosts, not for fanatical conditioning, nor the belief in xenocide necessary for human survival, and not even motivated by ideology. Instead it's two people who want to do it for individual profit, and even more to be able to take out the last Ghosts.
  • Pirius and Commissary Nilis from Exultant may look like level-headed individuals. But that's only in comparison to the walking insane asylum that is the Coalition. Always remember that they are still part of a regime so absolutely evil and morally reprehensive that it will give the Daleks some pause for thought. They are still very much strong believers of Hama Druz and the Coalition's practices and are either directly or indirectly responsible for an innumerable amount of war crimes. They may be portrayed as A Lighter Shade of Black but they would still be considered as absolute racist, xenocidal, sadistic monsters by our standards.
• Villainous Rescue: The Qax are tricked into fulfilling this role at the end of The Baryonic Lords, distracting the photino birds long enough for the last of humanity to escape through the Ring.
• Virtual Ghost: Virtuals, basically a copy of a living human's personality stored in a computer. Many of them inevitably outlive the original humans.
• Void Between the Worlds: The monads dwell in the chaotic ur-reality between universes:
  "There was no place. There was no time. A human observer would have recognised nothing here: no mass, energy, or force. There was only a rolling, random froth whose fragmented geometry constantly changed. Even causality was a foolish dream. The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks, would fizz into existence, and then scatter or annihilate, their brief walks upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare. This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of nonbeing where whole universes clustered in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind. Call them monads."
• The War of Earthly Aggression: Starfall documents the preparations and events of the Starfall rebellion conducted by the human extrasolar colonies against the Empire of Sol, based in New York.
• The Watcher: At some point of their evolution, the Snowmen turned themselves completely toward the philosophy that to record events — and only to record — was the highest calling of life. They took apart their world and rebuilt it as a monstrous storage system. They used all the material at their disposal to freeze as much data as they could in an artificial structure called the Snowflake, making near-optimal use of matter, by recording information right down to the thermodynamic limit set by the background temperature of the Universe. As the universe cools down they can store more data.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Xeelee starbreakers, which shoot focused gravity waves that can tear apart stars or cause them to go nova, certainly qualify. By the time of Exultant, humanity also uses guns which fire magnetic monopoles and later black holes.
• We Are as Mayflies: Hama Druz's doctrines actively invoke the 'humans as short-lived vicious vermin' mentality. The slogan most associated with that and endlessly repeated in the stories of this era is "A brief life burns brightly." That is, it's better to have a short and violent existence in the face of endless war than a longer, happy and more settled life. The Coalition's approach makes the Stalinist New Man look Epicurean by contrast.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Conurbation 2473 shows the typical human reaction to their suppressive Qax dictators suddenly fleeing Earth, leaving humans free for the first time in centuries. Rather than banding together to rebuild society, humans fight among themselves for dominance.
• We Have Reserves: The Coalition's Child Soldiers are more or less similar to modern teenagers, aside from the fact that they are artificially grown in clutches of hundreds at a time and become fertile at a much younger age. As a result of this, the Coalition loses over 10 billion Child Soldiers a year to the Xeelee. It's their duty to die. Not to fight for humanity, but to die. According to their "A brief life burns brightly!" ideology, there is nothing as glorious as child soldiers dying for the sake of dying.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: The Coalition's Green Army forces their soldiers to dig their own trenches even if it's more efficient to let machines do it, in order to reinforce their superstition that a shelter constructed by a machine will never be as safe as one you have dug out yourself.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Jovik Emry gives one to Michael Poole after Poole destroys the Titan ecosystem and edits the memory of Miriam Berg, who opposed it, to make her forget.
  What will you make her believe — that she stayed up on the Crab with Harry the whole time, while you went exploring and found nothing? That would work, I guess. I think you love her. I even think she loves you. Yet you are prepared to mess with her head and her heart, even her personality, to serve your grandiose ambitions. Let me tell you something. The Poole she left behind in that pocket universe – the one she said goodbye to — he was a better man than you will ever be again. Because he was not tainted by the great crime you committed when you destroyed the cavern. And because he was not tainted by this. And let me make some predictions. No matter what you achieve in the future, Michael Poole, this crime will always be at the root of you, gnawing away. And Miriam will never love you again. Even though you wipe out her memory of these events, there will always be something between you; she will sense the lie. She will leave you, and then you will leave her. One thing I know better than you is people, and what goes on in their hearts. You remember I said this. And, Poole, maybe those whose work you have wrecked will some day force you to a reckoning.
• Xenofiction: A few of the short stories set in the Expansion era in Vacuum Diagrams are partially told from the point of view of the aliens.
• You ALL Look Familiar: The degenerate descendants of the mortal transients on the Mayflower all resemble to some degree Lora, the dead girlfriend of the last living pharaoh Rusel. In an attempt to curry favour with Rusel, the transients are breeding themselves into replicas of Lora's images: if the Elder loved this woman so much, then choose a wife that looks like her, if only a little, and hope to have daughters with her delicate looks, and so win favour.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: In some interviews when asked about it, Baxter says any human attempts to comprehend Xeelee 'culture' and 'society' would be equal as an ant somewhere in Africa trying to comprehend workings and behaviour of the UN.
• You Killed My Father: Harry Gage opposed the Squeem to the end of his life for their murder of his parents.
• You No Take Candle: In In the Un-Black, the language of the savage post-humans, which has "devolved into jabber", is represented by broken English: "un-" replaces "no" and "not" as negative particles (hence "the Un-Black"), and some verbs have been replaced by nouns used as if they were verbs ("to death" instead of "to die" or "to kill", "to crime" instead of "to commit a crime", among others).
• Zerg Rush: The only tactic that the Coalition is able to use against the Xeelee is to throw endless warm human bodies at them, suffering staggering casualties for little to no gain.

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