This article details the various alien races and human offshots present in Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence of future history.
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The Xeelee are a hyper-advanced civilization which has existed for billions of years. Their technology far exceeds that of any other species, and lesser civilizations strive to acquire bits and pieces of Xeelee science. Even crude or damaged, this technology gives a huge technological boost to a species. The Xeelee are sometimes called "The Baryonic Lords", and are arguably the most advanced species in the universe.
The Xeelee are spread across the universe, typically being concentrated in the heart of galaxies where they use the black holes for their own purposes. However, they have spread gigantic artifacts and huge inscrutable structures throughout space.
Humanity first became aware of the Xeelee from the "Friends of Wigner", a cult-like group of humans from the future, during the events of Timelike Infinity. However it was not until the end of the Qax occupation that humanity had direct contact with the Xeelee when Jim Bolder visited the site of The Ring (giving it the colloquial name of "Bolder's Ring"). This object, also known as The Great Attractor, is drawing in galaxies for millions of light years around with its awesome gravitational well, and the xenophobic human government that rose after the fall of the Qax believed that it was an immense weapon.
Humanity avoided conflict with the Xeelee at first, but after conquering all other races in the Milky Way, they began to war with the Xeelee. This war lasted over twenty thousand years, with the last three thousand years being a virtual stalemate siege of the Milky Way's core black hole (named "Chandra" in the series).
In the events of Exultant humanity finally forced the Xeelee out of the Milky Way galaxy. 100,000 years passed, with humanity rising and falling throughout history. The scattered shards of humanity unified and began warring with the Xeelee once more, this time on a grander scale. Despite humanity being nearly as advanced as the Xeelee were, the war led nowhere. Humanity stopped attacking the Xeelee and returned to the Milky Way.
Little is known of the Xeelee in the next centuries since humanity was largely confined to one galaxy and had almost no contact. It was widely believed that the Xeelee had forgotten the human race, or had chosen to permanently ignore them. However, many millennia later, the stars in the Milky Way started disappearing—encased in Xeelee construction material. War broke out again as humanity was driven from the stars and slowly, over 300,000 years, forced back to the original Solar System. The Xeelee reduced the Human race severely with the fighting, and eventually trapped humanity on Earth, folding the planet into a pocket universe to seal mankind from the rest of the universe.
This was when humanity finally realised their mistake. The Xeelee had been fighting another menace: the Photino birds, dark matter beings who had been accelerating the aging of the stars. Humanity was at best a distraction but the Xeelee had decided to put them aside.
After humanity's fall the Xeelee returned to The Ring. The Ring had not turned out to be a weapon after all; it was an "escape hatch", a huge construct that tore a hole in the universe and opened a portal to parallel universes. The Xeelee's fight against the Photino Birds had been lost, and the Xeelee sought to escape. Their final act was to leave "lifeboats" of Xeelee technology for the less advanced species trapped in the doomed universe.
Photino birds are a species of dark matter entities that inhabit the gravity wells of stars. Because this habitat is dangerous, the photino birds engage themselves in an effort to age stars to the point where they are not prone to supernovae. This effort would make the universe uninhabitable by baryonic life forms; it therefore catches the attention of the Xeelee, whose ultimate purpose is to combat the photino birds. Photino birds are discovered to inhabit Earth's own sun.
Despite the best efforts of the Xeelee all attempts to defeat the birds fail and the Xeelee and the other surviving Baryonic life are forced to flee via the Ring. After this the few remaining Baryonics watch the long projects of the birds until the last of the stars go out.
The Photino birds are not considered an evil species. With the likely exception of the Xeelee, they hardly know about other existing life-forms. Lack of knowledge of other species has caused them not to realize that the aging of stars has unfortunate effects to the "normal" universe.
The Qax are the second extrasolar intelligent species to dominate the solar system. Their race consists of very few long lived individuals. Being composed of convection cells, a Qax requires complex life support and can be damaged easily; therefore their contact with the humans is usually indirect. Qax originated on a world of shallow seas, and built a trading empire through intermediates, manufacturing biochemical products or trading in the works of other species. They employed the Spline as transports and as warships. After Michael Poole contacted them in Timelike Infinity, the Superet corporation formed to develop projects and technologies which would prevent the Qax conquest, of which they were warned by the Friends of Wigner. Unfortunately, Superet's message went unheeded, and contact with the Qax led to conquest. The aliens oversaw human production of goods for trade more or less decently until the rebellion of the Friends of Wigner, when they began the Extirpation, a project designed to make humans slaves forever by eradicating history and memory. Humans were raised in cadres and did not know their parents. The Earth's surface was ravaged by starbreaker beams to wipe out buried objects and thus the archeological past; Earth's biota are replaced by genetically modified food algae and species transferred across space.
Jim Bolder's exploration both ended the Qax occupation and began the final war with the Xeelee. Bolder was a pilot hired by the Qax to survey the Great Attractor in Perseus; he did so and found Bolder's Ring, later named for him. Bolder tricked the Qax into attacking their own world and thus ended their empire.
There are hints that Qax survived by adapting their bodies to the fabric of space-time, instead of water. Thus, there may have been Qax alive as late as the final evacuation of the Solar System.
The squeem are a race of group minded aquatic beings, or "fishes", as referred by the humans. They are the first extrasolar intelligence contacted by mankind in the Xeelee series, and by the time of that contact, they occupy the solar system and enslave the human race. The Squeem are not especially intelligent or advanced, and resort to stolen technology from the Xeelee, for instance, the hyperdrive.
Far later, during the events of "In the Un-Black" and Exultant, advanced and high-ranking humans have Squeem embedded in their own bodies to provide a means of instantaneous communications. This appears weird and disturbing to other humans.
The Ghosts were a species that had the unfortunate position of being the first contact after the Qax occupation, the era of the Third Expansion. Although the Ghosts were largely benevolent explorers, concerned more with science and experimentation than conquest, they were met with unease. In part this was due to their track record of reckless experimentation with forbidden technologies, though Man's own prejudice towards unfamiliar aliens was prominent.
The Ghosts were most unique in appearance, being large floating spheres of silvery chrome. The Ghosts came from a world devastated by a supernova early in their history; despite being abandoned to the cold of space ("the Heat Sink" as they called it), the Ghosts survived. Initially they were allies of Man, although they were never truly trusted by the humanity that had been twice dominated and nearly destroyed by aliens. The Ghosts were often associated with forbidden experiments, as they frequently toyed with the laws of nature to advance their own knowledge. Examples of this would be the Planck-Zero AI, a disastrous experiment thought destroyed in a black hole but later revived for the dark-matter soliton star test; the hyperdrive designed to cross the visible universe to explore the distant lithium-3 event and the quagma ark; the gravity-wave weapon used during the war with Man; and the altered stars that affected the stability of matter, used as fortresses during their war for survival.
Despite the efforts of ambassadors such as Jack Raoul, the Ghosts eventually became an enemy of the Interim Coalition and were eventually hunted to extinction. This happened despite the fact that the Ghosts were never aggressive; indeed, the first contact between the two species saw a Silver Ghost sacrifice itself to save a stranded human astronaut. Even so, a paranoid humanity saw the Ghosts as a threat and sought to wipe them out, leaving behind only the useful pieces of their technology—even the silvery skins that the Ghosts used to protect their fragile inner bodies.
Although the Ghosts are commonly thought extinct by the time of Exultant, a faction of Man has revived the species on the remote Port Sol in the outer solar system. Although these Ghosts are completely detached from their earlier culture, they resemble the originals in many ways. The Ghosts remain tragic figures in the relentless Third Expansion and Assimilation Era, examples of humanity driven to unprecedented anger and drive to conquer.
The fate of the Ghosts is revealed in one of Baxter's standalone stories. Pursued into extinction by Man, the Ghosts slip into a different universe created or chosen by the Xeelee as a gift for them, a universe of mathematical perfection that would please the Ghost mind.
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