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A review by corymojojojo
Coalescent by Stephen Baxter
5.0
This book has changed my opinion on Stephen Baxter. I thought he was just an imaginative writer who sometimes gets lucky when his ideas are good enough that his writing quality doesn’t really matter, but now I’m inclined to believe this guy is seriously a genius. I can’t wrap my head around how he can write books this well when he pumps out something like two novels every year….
Coalescent is a very different book than his other Xeelee stories, even though it’s technically set in the same universe. Instead of the usual super hard sci-fi space opera, this is more of a historical thriller set plainly on Earth. Whereas Baxter usually focuses his intensive info dumps on science and cosmology, this time he focuses it on Roman history and Darwinian biology. This book is very much a slow burn, but man is the payoff worth it. And not only are his ideas mind-boggling as always, he actually managed to write some great and compelling characters this time. Thank god for that too, if Regina wasn’t such a well-conceived character, I don’t know if I could have made it through the Roman history info dumps that filled the middle of the book. I’m not sure how he did it, but somehow he snuck a book about Roman history into his hard sci-fi space opera series and inexplicably succeeded.
Coalescent is a very different book than his other Xeelee stories, even though it’s technically set in the same universe. Instead of the usual super hard sci-fi space opera, this is more of a historical thriller set plainly on Earth. Whereas Baxter usually focuses his intensive info dumps on science and cosmology, this time he focuses it on Roman history and Darwinian biology. This book is very much a slow burn, but man is the payoff worth it. And not only are his ideas mind-boggling as always, he actually managed to write some great and compelling characters this time. Thank god for that too, if Regina wasn’t such a well-conceived character, I don’t know if I could have made it through the Roman history info dumps that filled the middle of the book. I’m not sure how he did it, but somehow he snuck a book about Roman history into his hard sci-fi space opera series and inexplicably succeeded.