Transcendent
Stephan Baxter
Del Rey, Dec 2005, $25.95, 488 pp.
ISBN 0345451919

Earth in the year 2027 is a different place to be due to the climatic changes; the poles melted, the oceans rose and coastal flooding changes the geography of the planet. The planet seems to be in its death throes with levels of carbon dioxide and methane rising but scientist Michael Poole has devised a way to keep the gases that want to escape trapped way below the earth. While he and his fellow scientists are working on the problem, his wife Morag dead for seventeen year, keeps appearing to him. He wants to prove she is real and not a ghost.

Fifty thousands years in the future Alia who lives on a space station Witnesses Michael (learning facets of his life from birth to death). Humanity is guarded by the Transcendence, superminds who are on the verge of singularity and are ready to take the next step in man's evolution. Yet something is holding them back from that; they want Alia to join them and hope they can find the redemption to move on. Alia, who learns what being in transcendence is like is not sure that is the road she wants to travel but to save humanity, she must allow the transcendence to bend space and time so that she can find answers that only Michael Poole can supply.

Told in alternating chapters from the point of view of Michael in the first person and Alia in the third readers get a close up look at humanity at two very different crossroads of its existence. This is a thought provoking exciting work of science fiction with visual description of radically different time frames that seem realistic to the audience. The finale to Destiny's Children trilogy is a very satisfying and enriching reading experience.

Harriet Klausner