Riding the Rock

Xeelee Sequence #7

by Stephen Baxter

Eighteen thousand years have passed since the birth of the Third Expansion. Humanity spans the Galaxy ­ and has become locked in a titanic, unending battle with their ultimate foe, the Xeelee.

Luca is a novice at the Commission for Historical Truth. Based on E arth, young Luca is at the heart of the mesh of intelligence that controls and drives the Galaxy-wide war. But now into his life comes Captain Teel ­ a woman as young as he is, enigmatic, compellingly beautiful ­ but also a serving officer from the Front itself.

Luca is immediately captured by an infatuation for Teel. But Luca's duty to the Expansion sends him on an extraordinary journey to the deadly core of the Galaxy, where he must confront the truth of an interstellar war, a war that spans a hundred thousand light years and has endured for millennia.

In the midst of this superhuman conflict ­ even as he 'rides the rock' with Teel into the jaws of the ultimate darkness ­ Luca must strive to protect his own humanity from being crushed by the great events in which he is enmeshed.

This new story is set in Stephen Baxter's acclaimed future history The Xeelee Sequence. A remote sequel to Reality Dust (PS Publishing 2000), Riding the Rock is a story of love, war, and the destiny of mankind.

Genres: Science Fiction, Space Opera

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Stephen Baxter is a trained engineer with degrees from Cambridge (mathematics) and Southampton Universities (doctorate in aeroengineering research). Baxter is the winner of the British Science Fiction Award and the Locus Award, as well as being a nominee for an Arthur C. Clarke Award, most recently for Manifold: Time. His novel Voyage won the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Novel of the Year; he also won the John W. Campbell Award and the Philip K. Dick Award for his novel The Time Ships. He is currently working on his next novel, a collaboration with Sir Arthur C. Clarke. Mr. Baxter lives in Prestwood, England.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a short book by anyones account however what gives it appeal to me is that its a small press imprint from a recognised author from an established story arc. Don't get me wrong this stands alone in its own right and as introduction quite rightly says it has power of its own - (don't worry i wont be quoting the introduction as Gregory Benford does it far better and more creatively than i ever could). But if you are familiar with the Xeelee this is another chapter in the millennia long war with mankind.
Small press books may not be cheap or in some cases particularly professionally assembled (not the case with PS Publishing who i love the work of) but i feel that in a world increasingly electronics and instant its good to see publishers still pushing the boundaries and creating beautiful books as well.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of Baxter's less remarkable works for a number of reasons. First, although presented as a novella, and published as a stand-alone work (indeed, in a pricey limited edition), this is a short story if I've ever read one.

Second, it is pessimistic even by latter-day Baxter standards, depicting the conflict with the Xeelee not simply as perpetual, but as an open-eyed nihilistic self-sacrifice. After all, what is the point of fighting an endless war to "save humanity" if the act of doing so deprives us of those characteristics which make us fundamentally human? Perhaps this is Baxter's point, and the ending does seem to hint at something of the sort, but the idea that our better natures would necessarily be corrupted in such a seemingly organic and inevitable manner renders us in a particularly unflattering light. While the current state of human affairs (IRL) argues in favor of Baxter's pessimism, and while I'm not a fan of starry-eyed optimism, I think the author's take here is lacking the wiggle room which a more nuanced take on the matter might have yielded.

Third, this story would have been much better served if it had been fleshed out to novella length. In particular, the relationship between Luca and Teel did not have any real chance to develop, thus rendering it perfunctory. By the same token, Dolo's character, which is intriguing and in many ways conflicted, would benefit from deeper development, perhaps even some back story.

On the other hand, I've written an inordinate amount about a story which was a scant 60 pages in length. So Baxter must have done something right, although I find myself at a loss to articulate exactly what. In short, this should have been relegated to a collection of stories, or, better yet, expanded.

[Nicholas Whyte]

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/ridingtherock.htm[return][return]Near my home is a Commonwealth War Cemetery, a peaceful, neatly tended lawn where rows of headstones commemorate almost a thousand young men and women who died in last century's wars. A handful date from the end of the 1914-18 conflict -- most of these in fact seem to have died after the armistice was signed -- but the majority come from a single week in May 1940, when our sleepy central Belgian valley was briefly on the front line in the Second World War. The British position became untenable and they withdrew to Dunkirk, leaving their dead -- including a first cousin of King George VI -- behind them. I often see flowers or even photographs which have been recently left at individual tombstones there, two generations on.[return][return]In Stephen Baxter's Riding the Rock, some of the soldiers fighting the eighteen thousand year war between humans and the alien Xeelee are under investigation for "anti-Doctrinal thinking". They have committed heresy by building a memorial to their dead -- an arch, beautifully portrayed on the front cover of this PS Publishing novella, on which each of the fallen is named individually. The ideological basis for the war is controlled by the Orwellian-sounding Commission for Historical Truth, which allows no room for individual commemoration; as Luca, the Commission Novice who is the viewpoint character, protests early on, "It's the species that counts."[return][return]Luca, along with his master and the enigmatic, attractive young woman officer who has brought them the report of heresy, is sent to the front to investigate. He ends up participating in an attack on the Xeelee at the galactic core, a location whose portrayal Gregory Benford assures us is "scientifically accurate", in an introduction which passionately argues the merits of "hard sf". Does it really matter, I wonder, if it is scientifically accurate or not? Will this become a worse story, if in ten or fifty years it turns out that Benford and his fellow astrophysicists have got it completely wrong? Is, for instance, Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" of less literary merit because there are no dying civilisations with beautiful dancers on Mars?[return][return]In the end, the Commission is revealed as dehumanising and inhuman in its efforts to preserve humanity. Baxter's general argument against the awfulness of treating humans as statistics in a war without end is well made, and his portrayal of the conscription and brainwashing of child soldiers has unhappy resonances in several of today's African conflicts. Luca's transition from zealous acceptance of Doctrine to horror at its human consequences makes this a rite-of-passage story with a real kick.[return][return]I did scratch my head a bit at the actual concept of "riding the rock" which gives the story its title. It's a rather unsatisfactory transposition of trench warfare into a far-future context which seems to me unlikely to have any chance of success in the implied time available, especially given the supposed realist constraints of hard sf. Significantly the story is dedicated to Baxter's own grandfather, who it is implied was himself a survivor of the First World War trenches.[return][return]Most of his comrades must have ended up in cemeteries like the one near my home, remembered each November by those left behind. Which leads me back to the core problem of the story: it's difficult to conceive of even the strongest totalitarian regime successfully repressing the human instinct to commemorate loss -- indeed, the smartest ideologists have always used funerals as propaganda. But of course many of the best stories are written about improbable events, and Baxter's bleak prose makes this grim future seem just sufficiently plausible.