Absolutately flew through this book! It was amazing. The story seems predictable at first, but you quickly find that this is not true. I read this book although it is part of a series, it stands alone just fine. All relative information needed is rehashed for the reader quickly. The imagination this guy has is truly humbling, though I wish I had paid more attention at physics classes to seperate the bs from the science ;-)
Ring tells the story of the end of the universe and the
saving of mankind from its destruction. Two parallel plots are followed
throughout the novel: that of Lieserl, an AI exploring the interior of the sun for millions of years, and that of the Great Northern, a generation ship of humans sent on a five-million-year journey (though only a thousand years will elapse onboard, due to relativistic time dilation effects).
Lieserl is abandoned for five million years leaving her to observe the sun's interior. She discovers dark matter based life, which she names photino birds. These birds gradually drain the energy from the core of a star, ending fusion and causing premature aging into a stable red giants—the birds' preferred habitat, as it has no risk of going supernova and destroying them.
A generation ship is sent with one end of a wormhole to explore the future and investigate the whereabouts of Michael Poole. The crew is broken into three factions—the primitives, the virtuals, and a survivalist
faction Superet. Their journey is a round trip taking them to the
future of our solar system through relativistic time dilation.
Between the factions, the primitives are a eugenics
project for Garry Uvarov who hopes to lengthen the lives of humanity
without the use of anti-senescence technology. The Superet rely heavily
on failing technology and maintain a totalitarian goverment which refuses to acknowledge the existence of other decks on the ship; the virtuals remain aloof.
Upon their arrival, the entire universe is full of red stars. The Northern makes contact with Lieserl, named after Einstein’s
daughter, who explains her observations of the photino birds. The
photino birds don’t just exist in our sun but every sun, helioforming
them to an amenable habitat. The Xelee, masters of baryonic matter, have known about the photino birds and have been striving to
thwart them. The baryonic universe is doomed but the Xeelee create a big dumb object which is an escape hatch. A cosmic string is made into a loop and creates the phenomena of the Great atractor. The function of the Ring is to create a Kerr metricat its centre, which, in this fictional universe, creates a portal to
other universes; the rotating Ring is somewhat similar to a tipler cylinder.
Whenever humans have met up with the Xeelee and pursued war, this was
merely an annoyance since the Xeelee were thinking on a larger scale
about more potent enemies. The crew of The Northern and Lieserl discover the folly of their species.
A Xeelee nightfighter is discovered in Callisto and it is rigged to piggyback The Northern
to the Great Attractor. Fifty days later they discover that the
Xeelee’s project has been destroyed but a recently awakened virtual of
Michael Poole shows Spinner-of-Rope, a primitive, how to pilot around
the fragmented cosmic strings and travel into the past using a closed time-like path; this method of time travel was first suggesed by J. Richard gott.
These last humans return to the Ring, in an era in which it was not
destroyed; the Xeelee allow them through, and they briefly attempt to
pick universes (rejecting the high-gravity universe depicted in Raft) and find sanctuary in another younger universe, after passing through the Ring, and get to work on starting a new world.
Michael Poole remains in our universe and witnesses the deaths of the last stars, and the decay of the last protons-
the final victory of the dark matter lifeforms over the baryonic Xeelee
and lesser races. Eventually, his consciousness disperses, and history
ends.
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