Baxter s ability to combine wildly divergent narrative threads has become a trademark of his writing and has been seen to its best effect in the previous two novels from this sequence. TRANSCENDENT with its melding of a near future narrative that carries a terrible warning about the post oil and post global warming world and a narrative thread that tours the fantastically varied diverse species that mankind has become in the impossibly distant future is an example of Baxter at his best. At once a cautionary tale of what we are capable of destroying and a celbration of what we could become this is the capstone to Baxter s best series to date. In TRANSCENDENT we find out what happened to the children of the Poole brothers (from COALESCENT) and what will happen to mankind.