The Background to the ‘Destiny’s Children’ Series

'Fractal Futures', first published in BSFA Focus, November 2005.
© Stephen Baxter 2005

As I write I’m putting the finishing touches to Resplendent, which is (in the noble tradition of Douglas Adams) the fourth book in my ‘Destiny’s Children’ trilogy.

This series, published in the UK by Gollancz and in the US by Del Rey, is about the possibilities of human evolution. The first novel Coalescent (2003) is set in the present day, with the hero George Poole uncovering a human ‘hive’ in the catacombs of Rome. Exultant (2004) is set 25,000 years in the future, when humanity is locked in a galactic war. Transcendent (2005) follows up both the previous books, as George Poole’s nephew Michael deals with climate-change disasters in the near future, amid an intervention from a far future beyond the Galaxy war. Resplendent (2006) is a ‘fix-up’ of short fiction (up to novella length) set against the background of this future history.

Where did this series come from, and how did it end up in its final form?

The answer is complicated; there were many inputs. But one starting point is Australia, which I visited in 1999 for the Melbourne worldcon. I was very struck by my first one-to-one with a ‘roo in a nature park north of Melbourne. Close to they seemed extraordinary, with those remarkable levered back legs. To my (non-biologist’s) eye kangaroos were examples of alternative bio-engineering, like aliens from the imagination of Niven, Vinge or Jack Cohen.   Of course kangaroos and the rest of the native fauna evolved differently from ‘us’ because of Australia’s long isolation from the other continents. Such experiences gave me a wonderful sense of deep time, and of the reality of evolution. (One outcome of this inspiration was to be my novel Evolution (2002).)

Another input was a visit to Japan in 1997 for a convention there. I’m lucky enough to be sold in many countries, and without wishing to stereotype, I’ve found that different national markets respond to different types of book. The French, for instance, liked the alternate-history politics of Voyage (1996). The Japanese, though, seemed to like the super-science of my earlier ‘Xeelee’ sequence, from Raft (1991) to Ring (1994), and the fix-up collection Vacuum Diagrams (1997). I always wondered if the Japanese felt they were already living in the near future compared to Europe and America. My Xeelee sequence, which began with my very first published fiction, ‘The Xeelee Flower’ (Interzone 1987), had been fruitful for me, but by the time I’d completed Vacuum Diagrams I’d come to feel enclosed by the whole thing, tied down by my own continuity. But the kindly enthusiasm of the Japanese fans made me think again.

In the Xeelee chronology humanity expands out from Earth into a universe chock-ful of alien life and cultures, in the manner of Niven’s ‘Known Space’, perhaps. The story simplifies as we become dominant, save for one foe: the aloof and supremely powerful Xeelee. At last we fall back, and after a million years we are defeated, our last survivors imprisoned in a bubble universe.

The earlier material had told the story of the beginning and the end of this saga. But now I began to think about the ‘middle bit’. How could mere humans actually fight an interstellar war? For one thing, every FTL starship is also a time machine, an awkward consequence of special relativity. I don’t believe this has been handled adequately before. I drew on my evolutionary speculations too. Even with FTL technology, war fronts spanning thousands of light years would surely translate into engagements lasting thousands of years. The human species is only a hundred thousand years old; if it lasted long enough, surely the war itself would become an evolutionary pressure. Perhaps in such a war the ultimate form of humanity would be the child soldier.

So I started to try to figure out in more detail how humanity’s rise and fall could come about, and how humanity might be shaped in response. After a couple of months I began to carve out specific ideas for short stories, the first being ‘Cadre Siblings’ (Interzone, 2000), the start of the sequence of stories that would result finally in Resplendent. For me nothing crystallises ideas so well as actually writing something down, and the short fiction let me feel my way into a complicated universe.

Meanwhile, however, I was gathering other ideas. I try to keep my mind open to a range of inputs, for you never know where an idea is going to come from or where it might lead you. In this case I attended a rather heavyweight conference on human evolution in London, at which one speculative paper described the Catholic Church as a hive(!). Well, one manifestation of a hive, as daughters give up their own chance of reproducing to sustain their mothers’ babies, is skewed reproductive strategies, and there are certainly plenty of those in the Church … The notion struck me particularly as I was born a Liverpool Catholic, and though I’m now lapsed I remain fascinated by the Church and its implications.

Of course hive minds have been done before, from HG Wells’s Selenites in The First Men in the Moon (1901) to the Borg of Star Trek. But I quickly learned that the sociobiologists' explanations of hives in nature have moved on a lot over the last few decades. And I read up on modern ideas of ‘emergence’, in which, like ants in their colonies, we humans too are all embedded in mass, mindless systems, from traffic jams to the economy, which arise out of our individual decisions and actions, but are out of control of any of us. These developments hadn’t been covered (as far as I knew) in sf to that point, and I felt it was time to visit the hives once more. I began to consider a book describing the survival of an early-Christian hive from Roman times to the present day. This would have more of the feel of a horror novel, I thought, compared to the space-operatic glitter of my Xeelee war idea.

And then (with apologies for the name-dropping) out of the blue I was contacted by Sir Arthur C Clarke, with whom, in parallel to all this, I was developing ideas for our ‘Time Odyssey’ collaborative series. On 27 January 2001 Clarke sent me a portion of a letter from Olaf Stapledon to JBS Haldane (!), dated 1945:

‘Your utopia is a very exciting one. Why, though, must the intelligent animals forget the brutality of the past? I want everything to be fully remembered, everything to be fully cognized … For me the final utopia is not simply the thing for which past misery is a necessary means, that when it is reached the past may be forgotten. The final utopia must somehow redeem the past [my emphasis], or else be something less than utopia. How it can do so I naturally don’t know, but at least it must be aware of the past, so that the past can at least be redeemed in the utopia’s awareness, as a valued part within the past-present-future (or eternal) whole.’

Clarke wrote, ‘Dear Stephen – This phrase [emphasised] haunts me – does it give you any ideas?’ It certainly did, as redemption was another echo of my Catholic past. (In fact Stapleton himself dramatised this idea to some extent in his Last and First Men.)

This was another piece that fit into my slowly developing thinking about my still-nebulous project. What could be the motivation of an arbitrarily advanced culture of highly evolved humans? If you have it all and can do anything, what could you possibly want? It seemed to me that Stapledon’s notion of a striving for redemption gave me a starting point.

But is redemption achievable, no matter how advanced your technology? It would surely be morally vacuous for an advanced civilisation to ‘wipe out’ the past. Likewise producing copies of individuals who live ‘perfect’ versions of their lives (as in physicist Frank Tipler’s Big Crunch heaven) is surely meaningless because the suffering of the originals is still ‘out there’ somewhere. In Christianity Christ ‘is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world’ (1 John 2). But there has been a two-thousand-year debate about what exactly Christ’s atonement meant, indeed what was the meaning of His death. (This old controversy was revived recently in the reaction to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.)

In the middle of 2001 I began to pull all this together into a proposal for a series of books to be called ‘Homo Superior’. The three books would be three possible outcomes of the human evolutionary future, but not set in a single universe. The first, now called Coalescent, set in the present and past, was about hive minds surviving from ancient Rome: our future as drones. The second, Exultant, was the Galaxy war set in my Xeelee universe: our future as child soldiers. And the third, Transcendent, was about a highly evolved but flawed mass mind of the far future trying to achieve redemption by meddling with the past – that is, our present. Why a series? The ideas behind these novels, while different from each other, were all expressions of a common root, an interest in the possibilities of evolution. I suspect series of novels are popular in sf precisely because they give you a framework wide enough to look at big ideas from many angles, and there can be few bigger ideas than human evolution.

I worked on this proposal during a signing tour of the UK for that year’s published novel, Manifold: Origin, and in the middle of drafting the next year’s novel, Evolution. This is the way it goes; as it generally takes a year from submission of a manuscript to publication, you always find yourself working on many projects at once, and ideas and themes from one project inevitably, it seems to me, overlap into the next.

Amid the mucking-about with contracts, publishers and agents that followed (I’m always happy to achieve a sale, of course) it emerged that the American marketeers didn’t like ‘Homo Superior’ as a title, for they imagined mid-westerners would think it had something to do with homosexuality. (I’m not making this up.) We bounced around alternatives and ‘Destiny’s Children’ was their choice, even though I felt it was a bit lame, and was worried I might get sued by Beyonce Knowles.

So I began working on the first of the novels, Coalescent, in 2002. There’s no cut-off point at which inputs and new ideas stop flowing, and as I started to drill into this novel the deeper thinking and new research reshaped my ideas. I’ve always had a certain fascination with Rome and Roman Britain. Perhaps this was a naïve romanticism about the fall of a great civilisation in the past: the story of Rome is more complicated, of course. But the mythos of the fall is part of its legacy. So I began to work that in as an element in the drama. As I researched further I visited locations: there’s no substitute for actually seeing a place if you can. So we visited Rome, and locations in Britain as well, such as Verulamium (St Alban’s) and the London Wall, a fascinating walk.

My main rescoping, though, was a decision to set all three of my novels in a single timeline, that of the Xeelee universe, so that now Books 1 and 3 would be respectively a prequel and sequel to Book 2, Exultant. For one thing I wanted to contrast this new series with my Manifold books which had used a similar parallel-universe strategy. And I had decided a single timeline would give greater resonance: while George Poole investigates the fall of Rome, a cataclysm in the past, he finds hints of greater cataclysms in the far future, to be developed in Books 2 and 3.

With the second book, Exultant, I was more explicitly revisiting my Xeelee universe. Human memory seems to have a series of cut-offs, which I’ve discovered as my career has (thankfully) lengthened. I may forget odd details of a book from a couple of years ago, but it’s still ‘mine’. A book from more than six or seven years ago, however, while of course I’ll remember working on it, doesn’t even feel like mine any more. So my earlier Xeelee material had the feel of an external input - as if, oddly, I was collaborating with a younger version of myself. But this helped the project, as incidents from the ancient history of the chronology became transmuted into myth, or the substance of religions. Michael Poole, a heroic but somewhat deranged engineer who features in the early material, is a descendant of the George and Michael Poole of ‘Destiny’s Children’. Also I suspect some of my earlier stuff, produced as I was learning the craft, has a deep connection to my subconscious concerns, never a bad well to draw from.

More inputs came from thinking about the Second World War, which shaped the 1950s Britain in which I was born. I visited Bletchley Park. In the Churchill War Rooms in Whitehall I was struck by a wall map of the world studded all over by pin marks. That map showed that with 1940s technology they really had managed a war on a global scale; if that was possible maybe we could also rise to the ‘challenge’ of a galactic conflict. I have always responded to stories of heroism, and technological ingenuity under pressure. But personally I’m anti-war, I don’t believe it’s any way for an advanced civilisation to resolve its problems, and I’m greatly suspicious of our leaders’ habit of using fear to control us. There are echoes of the Dambusters in Exultant, but Orwell is in there too. One speech I gave a military leader in a story in Resplendent came straight from Donald Rumsfeld.

When I came to Transcendent in 2004 I thought harder about the near future which was to be the arena for the far-future meddling. This section of the novel needed its own narrative, and I decided to tackle climate change, surely our greatest near-future threat, to be contrasted with galactic calamities in the further future. I’m depressed how much of the debate about climate change seems to veer from simple denial to a helpless listing of doomy possibilities. I wanted to be upbeat, to plot a way from now to an imagined 2047 in which we have managed a huge transition to a post-oil, low-carbon age.

These ideas were partly shaped by where I was living by now. We had moved from leafy but overcrowded Bucks to a rented house in a village called Ulgham in Northumberland, my wife’s home county, where we were house-hunting for a permanent move. Ulgham is a classic relic of our petrol-obsessed economy. Once it was a self-contained agricultural community. Now there are no facilities but a pub, and everybody travels to church, school, shops. I saw that to survive the end of oil we are going to have to abandon the false economies of this endless travelling and live more locally: a revival of a village culture. But I’m not fantasising a return to the Neolithic; with modern communications we can bring work and school to us, rather than the other way around. My 2047 vision is still utopian, however, because it is predicated on wise leadership from the US …

Another ongoing input, incidentally, has always been ideas from the trunk: stories that didn’t quite make it, but which nevertheless had elements worth revisiting. For example my novella ‘Mayflower II’, which won a BSFA award, drew on a never-published end-of-the-world story called ‘Custodian’ I drafted when I was nineteen, while another early story about undying babies called ‘Planet of Immortals’ was an input to my novella ‘Reality Dust’, and an end-of-the-sun story called ‘Twilight’ fed the closing novella of Resplendent. A story called ‘The Ghost Pit’ drew on a joky old piece called ‘Save Me, Captain Culpepper!’ published in the small press, and another piece called ‘The Cold Sink’ drew on ideas from a dodgy story called ‘The Glittering Caverns’ published only in Germany. A failed pitch for a TV drama called ‘Virtuals’, from 1997, was another input into Resplendent. And so on. One tip I’d certainly give budding writers is never to throw anything away; these ideas and characters are yours to reexplore.

Maybe the deepest input of all into this particular series was my childhood Catholicism. Authors are often asked what their influences are, the expected answers being a writer, a book, a movie, a TV show. But much more significant for each of us surely includes the type of landscape into which we’re born, the point in history, the ethnic identity, the culture. And for me that culture was Catholicism. But if religion has shaped my sf, perhaps I’m not alone.

Adam Roberts’ remarkable new survey The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2005) takes as its framing narrative the idea that science fiction arose (or rather was revived from ‘fantastic voyage’ traditions dating back to antiquity) during the Reformation, when Protestantism ripped itself alien-like out of the chest of a horrified Catholicism, and that since then the genre has been shaped by a dialectic between rational and ‘miraculous’ poles.

This makes sense to me. Stapledon’s Star Maker is about a quest for a supercosmic god outside the universe; works of Clarke’s like Childhood’s End and 2001 are about transcendence, godhood arising from within us. Even in comic-book mythologies you find Jesus-figures all over the place, not least Superman, the ur-hero himself. In an early episode of Smallville Clark Kent was ‘crucified’ in a repulsive high-school-hazing stunt; the writers of that smart show demonstrated they understood the deeper roots of their character. Even Doctor Who, in the final Tom Baker story ‘Logopolis’, ‘died’ in the process of defeating the Master, only to be resurrected (as Peter Davison).

Perhaps this religious dialectic lies at the centre of the genre’s meaning because, long before sf,  religions taught us to frame questions about the universe. For example the Fermi Paradox has much in parallel with the much more ancient conundrum of silentum dei, the ‘Silence of God’. Bertrand Russell was once asked how he would respond to God if he were called to account for his atheism: Russell said he would ask God why He should have made the evidence for His own existence so poor. Perhaps the universe imagined by SETI enthusiasts, dominated by superior but invisible consciousnesses, really isn’t so different from the Christian universe. The premises of all our religions may be wrong. But thinking about God will have served a profound purpose if it has been a kind of vast practice run, a training programme that has lasted millennia, to prepare us to deal with the real gods out there.

I think there’s surely much truth in Adam’s reading, though perhaps not the whole truth; nothing as complicated as sf can be boiled down to a single storyline. It certainly works for me. The whole of the Xeelee sequence is about a war in heaven, with we humans caught in the middle. And arguably you could see the three ‘Destiny’s Children’ novels as different searches for a vanished God.

While I was still working on the project, of course, the first books and stories began to appear. I was reassured that my struggle through this thicket of ideas had resulted in material that received good reviews and won a few awards, along with a few brickbats. Sometimes success is unexpected, however. I hadn’t really anticipated the positive response to Coalescent, my first near-contemporary novel, and the most autobiographical, I suppose. I was pleased, but I realised now that the follow-up, the space-operatic Exultant, was going to be a jolt for the readers. But by then it was too late to change horses.

Now, though Resplendent still has to go through its editorial process, and though I’m working on a new series of stories (called ‘Old Earth’ and published by Analog) set in a still further Xeelee future, my Destiny’s Children project is complete, and I’m working on new stuff. The process of developing ideas - my process anyhow at this stage of my career - seems messy and fractal. I’ll focus on the needs of a single story or novel chapter which might take a day or two to draft, but which is set in the overlapping contexts of a novel, and of a series which spans several years’ work, and indeed of my whole career, dating back to ‘The Xeelee Flower’ – and even before, as elements of my background such as my childhood Catholicism find expression. Messy and fractal, but endlessly fascinating, and fun.