Resplendent

Resplendent was released on 21 September 2006 in the UK and in the US on September 13, 2007. It is the fourth and final book in Stephen Baxter's Destiny's Children series.

This book is a collection of short stories relating to the previous three books, comprising new works and previously-published stories, including the novellas Reality Dust and Riding the Rock and Mayflower II, an 88-page novella taking place in the Xeelee Sequence that won the 2004 BSFA Award for the Best Short Fiction; it was published in 2004.

It contains the following stories:

• “Cadre Siblings”, Interzone 153, 2000-03.
• Reality Dust, 2000.
• “Silver Ghost”, Asimov’s, 2000-09.
• “On the Orion Line”, Asimov’s, 2000-10.
• “In the Un-Black”, Redshift, 2001.
• “The Ghost Pit”, Asimov’s, 2001-07.
• “The Cold Sink”, Asimov’s, 2001-08.
• “Breeding Ground”, Asimov’s, 2003-02.
• “The Great Game”, Asimov’s, 2003-03.
• “The Chop Line”, Asimov’s, 2003-12.
• “The Dreaming Mould”, Interzone 179, 2002-05.
• “Conurbation 2473”, Live without a Net, 2003-08.
• “All in a Blaze”, Stars: Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, 2003.
• Riding the Rock, 2002-11.
• “Lakes of Light”, Constellations, 2005.
• “Between Worlds”, Between Worlds, September 2004.
• Mayflower II, 2004-08.

The plot of Mayflower II is about five generation ships leaving a doomed plant. As thousands of years pass, the humans forget that they are on a spaceship and begin running its mechanisms only through religious ritual. After 25,000 years, the humans on the ship have split in their evolution with half becoming short-lived child-like tribal people and half becoming cannibalistic animals. The ending speaks to the fact that although this situation seems gruesome and terrible that life and evolution find a way and that humans found a way to continue on living even if it meant giving up what is traditionally thought of as human.

• “Ghost Wars”, Asimov’s, 2006-01.

References

• The Manifold