You can’t accuse Baxter of thinking small. If Wells is one influence (in the unrelated The Time Ships), then the outrageous sense of scale of time and space, the entire history of not just humanity but the universe itself, is also Stapledonian in scope. His background in science and mathematics is both strength and weakness. With such a huge canvas, the protagonists often lose detail. At worst, the characters are plywood, tagged by ‘Burly Detective’ identifications, there to explain current scientific theories to each other. At best, Baxter brings us wonders which invite awe at their sweep and grandeur. Criticism of the individual stories is a bit like criticising individual bricks in a house; this one may be a little richer in colour, a bit less crumbled round the edges, or less well mortared, but the house stands or falls as a whole. What we have is no less than the five million year span of the Rise and Fall of the Human Empire. After a succession of occupations by trader-conquistador races, the Squeem and the Qaz, scrabbling for the cargo cult debris of the mysterious Xeelee, humanity rises to a near dominance which dares challenge the godlike elder race, then falls into degeneracy as a handful of tribal primitives locked away in a pocket universe.

Collected from different publications over some eight years, you notice repeated motifs, phrases, and images, especially in the earlier stories. There’s also a number of nods and references to other classic SF works, from the distorted topology of Heinlein’s ‘And He Built a Crooked House’ (‘The Eighth Room’), to Blish’s ‘Surface Tension’ (‘Hero’) to Shaw’s The Ragged Astronauts (‘Shell’). Baxter, in the Afterword to his other collection, Traces, acknowledges a number of conscious and unconscious influences.

While the panoramic sweep has a mythological grandeur, for me, the later stories are more successful, more human scaled; the linked sequence of ‘Shell’, ‘Eighth Room’ and the ironically titled ‘The Baryonic Lords’, in which the degenerate remnants of humanity effect escape from their failing pocket universe and finally from the equally doomed wider universe that is being contested between the Xeelee and the inimical dark matter photonic birds.

Graham Greene once made a distinction between his novels and his ‘entertainments’. Traces is Baxter at play, freed from the (admittedly wide) constraints of his structuring Xeelee ‘Future History’. In here, Herman Göring flies a Fokker triplane to the literal axis of the South Pole, in a world where the Greek cosmology of interlocking celestial spheres is true (a conceit echoed by Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters). The Reichschancellor reappears briefly in ‘Mittlewelt’ where WW1 victors Germany launch a stratospheric bomber attack on Tokyo. A Cunard space liner powered by anti-ice is hijacked by a French terrorist in the Verne-like ‘A Voyage to the King Planet’, and in ‘Darkness’ a computer simulation of Byron (echoing Amanda Prantera’s Conversations With Lord Byron, 163 Years After His Lordship’s Death) recreated to quiz him on the visions behind the eponymous poem, achieves a problematic sentience. ‘Blood of Angels’ is almost a love story, but with a hard biologic twist of species survival in a hostile environment. Engineered niche adaptation fuels a number of Baxter’s stories of human colonisation, such as the disturbing ‘In the Manner of Trees’, ‘Downstream’ and the strange far future Catholicism of ‘Inherit the Earth’. Others are more whimsical, such as the trial of Superman as a failed Messiah in ‘Good News’, or the wistful alternate space programs in ‘Moon Six’, ‘Pilgrim 7’ and the short, but almost perfect, elegiac ‘In the MSOB’. There are weaker stories, of which the early title story is probably one, but not really a duff one. If you’ve not come into contact with Baxter, this would be a good place to start.