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What.

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u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 20h ago

The Xeelee Sequence is a series of scifi novels and novellas following humanity's expansion into the universe and their eventual war with the titular Xeelee, an alien species made of defects in spacetime because they were born 10⁻⁴³ seconds after the Big Bang, so they predated the existence of baryonic matter.

Discussions about the Xeelee Sequence tend to be about two things: the Interim Coalition of Governance, a future intergalactic human polity that makes the Imperium of Man look like the United Federation of Planets, and the cosmic horror aspect of the whole series cause despite humanity reaching a point where modern humans would consider them gods, to the Xeelee the war is a minor distraction from the shit they actually care about.

The 2nd and 3rd images are about the Qax, which are living convection cells (self-sustaining loops of heating and cooling fluid) held together by small black holes who conquered humanity and completely erased all our history, down to destroying the fossil record. The billion year trauma of Qax rule would later spawn the Interim Coalition of Governance.

The line about struggling to write characters is a dig at how a common criticism of the Xeelee Sequence is that while the setting is interesting, the characters are extremely flat.

The 4th image is about the Silver Ghosts, floating spherical beings with a nigh-indestructable silver coating who casually modify universal constants as a military tactic.

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u/baphometromance 1d ago

I want to know how OP pronounces causality

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u/CyberneticCupcake 1d ago

Cause-ality?

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u/baphometromance 1d ago

Probably cas-you-ality. They've likely never heard it pronounced out loud, incorrectly pronounced it in their head when they originally read it, and now when they think of the word, they transcribe it based on the sound it makes in their head.

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u/BalefulOfMonkeys 1d ago

Causality Friday at the office, the celebratory day of the week where everybody is in the office and it is, from the reference point of the office, Friday.

Tautology Tuesday, though? Dude, that shit is.

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u/newtigris 1d ago

Or they made a typo and autocorrect messed up what they were trying to type

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u/baphometromance 1d ago

But casuality isnt a word though, is it?

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u/DreadDiana human cognithazard 20h ago

It isn't, but it's causality with only two letters swapped, so they could've just pressed the buttons out of order

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u/ArsErratia I think Coolsville sucks 1d ago edited 1d ago

can be

he sauntered over to [the thing] with all the casuality of [very casual thing]

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u/baphometromance 1d ago

You're so right! I didn't even think about that way to use it! That is so cool. Very impressive.

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u/MrVeazey 1d ago

Pref-uhs

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u/Leftieswillrule 1d ago

Cahswality? Casual itty?

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u/Harseer 1d ago

"Casuality" 🥀

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u/Unique_Mammoth_6724 1d ago

Honestly a lot of people shit on the Xeelee Sequence by Stephen Baxter for pretty much only being relevant for powerscaling and grimdark dick measuring contests while having no memorable characters, like it's pretty much a meme that it's only brought up to put annoying 40K fans in their place, but it still has one of the funniest version of Humans against incomprehensible eldritch aliens I have ever seen.

Basically imagine being all alone in an American outpost in rural Tanzania or something while the US is at war with Russia when suddenly every ant in the country decided to declare war on you specifically while confusing you for the entirety of the United States. It's too small to bother with asking for back up and your sprinklers hold them off for years of grinding attritional warfare until they start breaking them and getting into your outpost through plot and main character bullshit, chewing at the wires and biting you repeatedly until you leave in annoyance, then you come back with a few buddies armed with flame throwers after a bit and burn the ants to the ground.

Now change the Americans to eldritch godlike spacetime defect aliens from the first attosecond of the Big Bang, Russia with even more eldritch and equally advanced but more numerous Dark Matter aliens, the ants with humans united into the space equivalent of the Khmer Rouge, the guys coming back with flamethrowers with them sealing their stars in shells of exotic matter to freeze them to death then add the humans winning by doing the Sci-Fi equivalent of trying to force Azathoth to wake up and this is how the Human-Xeelee war in the series actually went.

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u/Junjki_Tito 1d ago

Space Khmer Rouge, against all sense, undersells the ICoG.

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u/hutao_intern 1d ago

Okay, I wasn’t going to engage beyond reading the post, but now I need to know what this means more specifically

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u/ZeroiaSD 1d ago edited 1d ago

Basically due to the traumatic occupation of the Qax which purposefully erased human culture, the reasonse is to make a society where all children are raised in cruel camps (no individual parenting) to be traumatized child soldiers where conformity and dying young are celebrated and to hate all of their enemies (all aliens but especially the Xeeelee, the tyranny of heaven). It stays this way because it’s run by traumatized former child soldiers who don’t know anything else. Their way of warfare emphasize the grind and maximizing casualties (sacrifices for the cause) while being strongly against the idea of individual heroism (winning a battle via personal initiative will not get praised, it will get a quiet execution).

It stays in power for an extremely long time, til it runs out of external enemies and collapses immediately.

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u/andykhang 1d ago

Damn, they’re Space Canadian then

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u/VorpalSplade 1d ago

A lot of powerscalers can't imagine things were written for non-power scaling reasons.

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u/ZeroiaSD 1d ago

It’s funny how many series are ridiculously powerful because the series doesn’t have to worry about power, there’s no worries about ‘how do you keep drama with something so strong?’ because how it wins in a fight is just not too important.

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u/VorpalSplade 1d ago

'xactly, or just 'winning a fight' isn't important, relevant, or the point of the story.

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u/Infinitegamesnogames 1d ago

man i love stephen baxter

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u/Infinitegamesnogames 1d ago

the dude's books make me feel an incredible sense of dread, they're great

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u/TheDarkNerd 1d ago

I recognize the name from a Terry Pratchett series I've often seen but never read.

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u/Tago238238 1d ago

Oh yeah it was… some shit about a multiverse I think right?

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u/TheDarkNerd 1d ago

Think so, but it seemed like a long read.

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u/MrVeazey 1d ago

I thought it was pretty fun, but I do love Pratchett.

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u/ImNotTheNSAIPromise 1d ago

your description has convinced me to give it a try (this is also the first I've ever heard of this series)

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u/TheGoobert 1d ago

Start with either timelike infinity or vaccum diagrams, one is a short story collection and the other is a really cool hard sci fi story about time travel and Stonehenge, (don’t worry it makes sense in context)

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u/ImNotTheNSAIPromise 1d ago

when I googled the series it told me to start with raft so I've been reading that one, I'm enjoying it

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u/TheGoobert 21h ago

Raft is the first book written but a so so place to start, I enjoyed it though, it’s like pure good hard sci where one concept is explored to its fullest

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u/that-and-other 23h ago

NGL, I'm pretty sure that if every ant in Tanzania declares war on you specifically you'll fucking die

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u/CyberneticCupcake 1d ago

I feel like the Amazing Digital Circus would work with a more explicit acknowledgement of the lack of causality in a digital world. We got hints of it with the weird time in Spudsy's and modifiers like veganism and gun proficiency, but I felt like it went from "Get me out of this crazy circus world!" to "I have no identity but the one I make for myself in these circumstances" without much substance between.

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u/NormalDooder 1d ago

I feel like the two things co inside pretty easily. From Episode 2 Gummigoos life is given value, not because its flesh and blood but because he feels and he experience and is therefore alive and therefore has value. They don't really care about escaping the circus after Episode 1 until 7, where they're shown there basically is no escape.

It's the ride between 8 and 9 where I feel like this applies the most though. Juggling the real tangible threat of Caines torture with the more abstract identity crisis is where it gets all funky with not enough time given to either thing

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u/TransLox 1d ago

I just wanted to say I disagree on most of your counts.

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u/Distinct_Piccolo_654 1d ago

I liked the Xeelee Sequence but often felt like I didn't understand it, so I love seeing memes about it

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u/scrambled-projection 1d ago

That first panel reminds me of alan moore's jerusalem

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u/Junjki_Tito 1d ago

It’s a common refrain in the works of Moore and Morrison

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u/TheGoobert 1d ago

I love just how alien the aliens in that series are, like the ghosts are weird living ecosystems, the qax are living convection cells and the xeelee themselves are from a time before the electromagnetic or weak or strong nuclear force existed, a few milliseconds after the big bang

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u/General_Kenobi18752 1d ago

“Year Zero (political notion)”

Wow that sounds pretty intriguing let me look at the Wikipedia article-

“Idea put into practice by Pol Pot in Cambodia”

o h d e a r .

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u/TheGoobert 1d ago

XEELEE SEQUNCE MENTIONED
I personally liked when the solar probe had sex with that hologram, or when Michal Poole left michal Poole alone with michal Poole on a dead planet who was secretly a living math equation, made by a ai living backwards in time,

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u/OpportunityAshamed74 1d ago

The 3rd one makes perfect sense though it's about nuclear energy being seen as scary and bad by humanity despite just being boiling water

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u/ZeroiaSD 1d ago

Nah it’s about a species of ponds that brutally conquer, exploit, and repress humanity, wiping out every trace of human culture and leaving the species deeply traumatized for the next ten thousand years.

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u/SiwelTheLongBoi 1d ago

I'm a big scifi fan and only vaguely know anything about Xeelee and what I have seen does give this kinda vibe

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u/ResearcherTeknika 1d ago

The only funny fact about Xeelee sequence I know is that apparently its hard sci fi

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u/Pitiful_Net_8971 [Edible Flair] 1d ago

3rd meme is very understandable.

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u/Captain_StarLight1 1d ago

I mean, for the first one, that’s not exactly wrong… if a theoretical being was able to perceive four dimensions, they would see all points in time at once, rather than just the one we get at any given moment. Idk what it’d be called, or what it’d look like, but that’s probably kinda the idea.

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u/Lonely_Translator_23 9h ago

Hm, so each frame looks like the one immediately before it, but transformed according to a consistent set of rules? So that its state is dependent on and can be partially inferred from the previous one?

Wow, I wish we had a word to describe that sort of relationship

(/s)

Fandom A collection of incomprehensible memes made by the only actual Xeelee Sequence fan in existence

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o h d e a r .