Exultant

Exultant is a science fiction novel by the British writer Stephen Baxter, published by Victor Gollancz in September 2004 and the second part of the Destiny's Children sequence.

The war between humanity and the Xeelee has been running for twenty thousand years, and it is fought with armaments that make the conflict as much a matter of physics as of strategy, including weapons that operate through time. Billions of people have died and the society that sustains the war is organised around it, with an enormous military establishment and a doctrine that does not encourage questions. Into this setting Baxter places a young pilot whose experience of combat leads him towards the reasons behind the conflict: what the war is actually for, who is deciding that the price is worth paying and what the Xeelee have done to deserve it. Much of the novel is written as sections of grand scale, in which the ordinary human costs of an interstellar campaign are visible but rarely at the centre of the argument.

Baxter writes hard science fiction that takes its physics seriously, and this volume is one of the largest in scale of his novels about humanity's place in the universe.