THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10 BESTSELLER'Imaginative, sense-of-wonder at its best . . . thrilling stuff from the masters' Independent on Sunday'A thrilling and ceaselessly entertaining ride' SFX2040-2045: In the years after a cataclysmic eruption there is massive economic dislocation as populations flee to myriad Long Earth worlds.Sally, Joshua, a...

THE EXTRAORDINARY FINAL INSTALMENT OF THE BESTSELLING LONG EARTH SERIES'Intricately described . . . gently immersive' Guardian'Enthralling and thought-provoking in equal measure' Daily Mail'A love letter to science-fiction itself' SFX2070-71. Nearly six decades after Step Day and in the Long Earth, the new Next post-human so...

Timelike Infinity: the strange region at the end of time where the Xeelee, owners of the universe, are waiting... The second novel in Stephen Baxter's Xeelee sequence.First there were good times: humankind reached glorious heights, even immortality. Then there were bad times: Earth was occupied by the faceless, brutal Qax. Immortality drugs were confiscated, the human spirit crushed. Earth became a vast factory for alient foodstuffs.Into this new dark age appears the end of...

Stephen Baxter's epic sequence of Xeelee novels was introduced to a new generation of readers with his highly successful quartet, Destiny's Children, published by Gollancz between 2003 and 2006. But the sequence of novels began with RAFT in 1991.From there it built into perhaps the most ambitious fictitious universe ever created. Beginning with the rise and fall of sub-quantum civilisations in the first nano-seconds after the Big Bang and ending with the heat death of the universe ...

It has been 14 years since the Martians invaded England. The world has moved on, always watching the skies but content that we know how to defeat the Martian menace. Machinery looted from the abandoned capsules and war-machines has led to technological leaps forward. The Martians are vulnerable to earth germs. The Army is prepared.So when the signs of launches on Mars are seen, there seems little reason to worry. Unless you listen to one man, Walter Jenkins, the narrator of Wells' ...

2045-2059. After the cataclysmic upheavals of Step Day and the Yellowstone eruption humanity is spreading further into the Long Earth, and society, on a battered Datum Earth and beyond, continues to evolve.Now an elderly and cantankerous AI, Lobsang lives in disguise with Agnes in an exotic, far-distant world. He’s convinced they’re leading a normal life in New Springfield – they even adopt a child – but it seems they have been guided there for a reason. As rumours of stra...

Brought to you by Penguin.A generation after the events of The Long Earth, mankind has spread across the new worlds opened up by Stepping. Where Joshua and Lobsang once pioneered, now fleets of airships link the stepwise Americas with trade and culture. Mankind is shaping the Long Earth – but in turn the Long Earth is shaping mankind ... A new ‘America’, called Valhalla, is emerging more than a million steps from Datum Earth, with core American values rest...

8,000 years ago Europe was a very different place. England was linked to Holland by a massive swathe of land. Where the North Sea is now lay the landmass of Northland. And then came a period of global warming, a shifting of continents and, over a few short years, the sea rushed in and our history was set.But what if the sea had been kept at bay? Brythony is a young girl who lives in Northland. Like all her people she is a hunter gatherer, her simple tools fashioned from flint cutti...

2070-71. Nearly six decades after Step Day and in the Long Earth, the new Next post-human society continues to evolve.For Joshua Valienté, now in his late sixties, it is time to take one last solo journey into the High Meggers: an adventure that turns into a disaster. Alone and facing death, his only hope of salvation lies with a group of trolls. But as Joshua confronts his mortality, the Long Earth receives a signal from the stars. A signal that is picked up by radio astro...

Baxter's ability to combine wildly divergent narrative threads has become a trademark of his writing and has been seen to its best effect in the previous two novels from this sequence. TRANSCENDENT, with its melding of a near future narrative that carries a terrible warning about the post-oil and post-global warming world and a narrative thread that tours the fantastically varied diverse species that mankind has become in the impossibly distant future is an example of Baxter at his best.

Hundreds of years in the future, on a stagnating and almost empty Earth, a space shuttle pilot from the early days of the 21st century is awoken from the cryogenic sleep he entered after a devastating accident.As he comes to terms with this new world, he begins to realise that their history does not match what he remembers - and that only he may be able to stop the coming catastrophe destined to destroy the planet.Until he meets a young woman who seems to have a drive of he...

Bestselling science fiction author Stephen Baxter was inspired to write the Jones & Bennet stories, set when he was growing up in the 1960s, by real events. The Paradox Conspiracies contains two novellas, “Project Hades” and “Project Herakles, previously collected only in a limited edition hardcover.Stephen Baxter is the pre-eminent sf writer of his generation. Published around the world, he has also won major awards in the US, UK, Germany and Japan. Born in 1957, he has degrees fr...