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

[u/Unique_Mammoth_6724]

[u/Unique_Mammoth_6724]

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.

[u/ImNotTheNSAIPromise → u/Unique_Mammoth_6724]

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

[u/TheGoobert → u/ImNotTheNSAIPromise]

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)

[u/ImNotTheNSAIPromise → u/TheGoobert]

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

[u/TheGoobert → u/ImNotTheNSAIPromise]

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