Reality Dust

Resplendent is an English language science fiction collection by British writer Stephen Baxter, published in 2006. It is the fourth and final book in the 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, 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.

Reality Dust is the sixth work in the Xeelee Sequence. The plot begins not very long after the Third Expansion began (the First Expansion ended when humanity was conquered by the Squeem; the Second Expansion ended with the conquest of humanity by the Qax, and the Third Expansion, ~5400 CE, began after the events of Timelike Infinity, pursuant to Jim Bolder's destruction of the Qax home-system). The protagonist, one "Hama", an investigator for Earth's Truth Commission, is investigating the surviving Qax-collaborators (as the Qax restricted access to AS- anti-senescence technology – to collaborators, they are rather old, and are known as "Pharaohs"); he follows one renegade Pharaoh to Callisto.

Riding the Rock is the seventh work in the Xeelee Sequence. The plot is set in the Third Expansion era, in which humanity has thrown off the successive yokes of the Squeem and the Qax, and has been so successful that it is second only to the Xeelee among baryonic races. However, humanity's jealousy has driven it to futilely and brutally dedicate their culture (sending soldiers off as young as 13) to warring for over 18,000 years upon the Xeelee. The characters engage in quasi-trench warfare against the Xeelee in the galactic core.

Mayflower II is the eighth work in the Xeelee Sequence. The plot centers on five generation ships leaving a doomed planet. 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 childlike 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.

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