Coalescent

Coalescent is a science fiction novel by the British writer Stephen Baxter, published in 2003 as the first part of the Destiny's Children sequence.

The book is built out of four movements, two of them set in the present and two in the past. George's investigation of his family begins as an ordinary piece of mid-life business and turns into an encounter with the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins, a community in Rome organised in ways that have no parallel outside it; the reader also meets an online group of speculative thinkers, one of whom is following an artificial object discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto. In the historical strand, the life of Regina during the collapse of Roman Britain around AD 400 shows where the Order's habits came from. Baxter's subject is a human group that has chosen to organise itself like a colony of insects, and the novel takes the idea seriously enough to follow it across a period of time no individual life could cover, which is why the last of the four parts steps back and looks at humanity's expansion into the galaxy.