an exotic weapon able to damage the ecological stability of the core's supermassive black hole. Minutes after the first successful strike, the Xeelee withdraw from the galaxy, effectively ceding the Milky Way to fully human control. Humanity continued to advance technologically for a hundred thousand years afterwards, then attacked the Xeelee across the Local Group of galaxies. However, despite having annoyed the Xeelee enough to give up activities in the Milky Way, humans, having become an extremely powerful Type III civilization themselves at this point, prove only to be a minor distraction to the Xeelee on the whole, being ultimately unable to meaningfully challenge their dominance across the universe. Although the Xeelee are masters of space and time capable of influencing their own evolution, they are ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the Photino Birds. They instead utilize cosmic strings to build an enormous ring-like structure (which comes to be known as Bolder's Ring, or simply the Ring) to permit easy travel to other universes, allowing them and other species to escape the Photino Birds' destruction of the universe. The Xeelee, despite their unapproachable aloofness and transcendent superiority, appear to be compassionate and charitable toward the younger and less advanced species that inhabit the universe, demonstrating this by doing such things as constructing a specially-made universe suited to the Silver Ghosts, who humans had nearly driven to extinction. Humans are likewise shown compassion by them and allowed to use the Ring to escape, despite their relentless long war against the Xeelee. Books Xeelee Sequence main novels Destiny's Children sub-series novels Collections of short stories and novellas Currently uncollected stories Chronology and reading order The novels in chronological order (as opposed to publication order) are given below. Some of the novels contain elements occurring at different points in the timeline. The story anthologies (Vacuum Diagrams, Resplendent, and Xeelee: Endurance) each contain stories taking place across the entire chronology. In 2009, Baxter posted a detailed chronology of the Xeelee Sequence explaining the proper chronological reading order of all the novels, novellas, and short stories up to that year. The timeline was updated in September 2015. When asked directly for a suggested reading order, the author wrote: "I hope that all the books and indeed the stories can be read stand-alone. I'm not a great fan of books that end with cliff-hangers. So you could go in anywhere. One way would be to start with