Nightmare Fuel / Xeelee Sequence

"More indoctrination. The children must be trained to handle weapons, to deploy destructive forces – and to kill?"

"There are native animals – flying, bird-like creatures – which they hunt. These days the animals are raised for that purpose, of course; it has ironically saved them from extinction. Yes, they must learn to kill."

"And people?"

"The Xeelee are not like us – but they are sentient. Therefore it helps to be exposed to the moral conflict of killing a sentient creature, before it is necessary to do it to save one’s life. So, yes, people too, when appropriate."

"Commissary, must we commit such barbarism to wage our war?"

"But there is no barbarism here. Novice, what did you expect? This regime, this crude empire of mud and clubs and blood, is actually a sophisticated processing system. It turns human beings, children, into machines."

— Dolo, a Commissary describing the Coalition's policy on Child Soldiers.

The Xeelee Sequence is infamous for how horrifying and bleak it is. This is a universe that combines the sheer scale and bleakness of a war between Kardashev Scale IV civilizations and what happens when despotic governments take control on time travel. The results are not pretty. Here is a short list on the level of depressing things that happens in the Sequence. All spoiler tags are unmarked, so you will be warned beforehand.

Old Humanity

• Even though not many details are given, the atrocities committed by the Protestant mercenaries during the Sack of Rome flashback in Coalescent are nauseating. They include a man being forced to rape his daughter, another being castrated and forced to eat his own testicles, and six members of the Order being gang-raped by Clemens and his men, one of them dying from the abuse she receives and the others sold to a brothel afterwards. Then there's the revelation that those six women stayed behind to get captured and divert attention from the rest of the Order.

The Alien Occupations

• Humanity has been uprooted and its entire history and culture obliterated by two oppressive aliens. Whatever was done to Humanity was so traumatic, it created a cross-generational PTSD that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years.
  • The first occupiers, the Squeem, turned the entire planet into a giant iceball after the humans poisoned several of the breeding ponds of the Squeem. This devastated the planet's ecosystem; outright causing a mass extinction in the ocean and forcing the Squeem to erase the memories of every human on the planet.
  • The second occupiers, the Qax, were far more brutal. It led to the absolute destruction and erasure of every human culture to the point that not even the fossil records survive. Every human ethnic and racial group was forced to interbreed to destroy any notion of humanity's past and they caused yet another mass extinction event on the planet. This was done with the aid of human traitors who sold off their kind in exchange for immortality and power. Earth was so sterilised and cleansed that very few biological organisms other than humans survived in the Coalition times. The only thing that survived of humanity was pain, suffering and despair; ripe for someone like Hama Druz to takeover.
    • The Qax from the future destroying the past Governor of Earth and taking charge. The sheer callousness and brutality he displays while killing the Governor with a starbreaker beam is very frightening, especially when he implies the Governor will spend the last hours of his existence in agonising pain, feeling his sentience, his very existence, slip away bit by bit as he decays into the sludge which carries him. And poor Jasoft was Forced to Watch as the first actually evil character in the novel kills the closest thing he (as a collaborator) has to a friend and colleague.

The Coalition

• The Coalition was so despotic and totalitarian, it gives Oceania a run for its money and makes the Imperium look like liberal space hippies. This is a government where being inducted in what is effectively a child suicide bomber corp is considered one of the highest honours a 'parent' could receive (if the concept of parents even exist by this time). This is a government where the length of indoctrination is so extreme, that the mere act of anti-governmental thought almost convinced one of the characters to commit suicide on instinct. This is a government where it shows what a totalitarian society with time travel on a tactical and strategic level could do to a human psyche, hint, it ain't pretty.
  • Nevermind the sheer levels of onscreen child abuse and vaguely implied state-sanctioned child rape being prevalent everywhere in stories set in the Coalition era.
  • Moreover, the Coalition showcase just what would happen if a totalitarian government takes control of time travel on a tactical and strategic level. The results are, if you even dare step out of line (or even think about it in an alternate future), both you and your multiple selves will be arrested and court-martialed at best. As Exultant most blatantly showcase. This is even more horrifying when one considers the sheer implication on the amount of abuse that any government will do to maintain its power if it gets to control its literal timelines.
  • The rate of intraservice abuse is so great that the Commissaries would routinely beat their child soldiers to death in front of other child soldiers for disciplinary action and it is done in vivid detail. Sometimes, it is hinted that these children would be physically, sexually and verbally abused in front of their cohorts to make a statement.
  • If the Coalition encounter a lone human settlement that was long forgotten after humanity's double defeat from the Squeem and the Qax. The first thing they will do is to enforce Coalition doctrine on the populace, rip the children away from their parents (with the parent either being mass executed or 're-educated') and then place the children in what is essentially Pol Pot's S-21, in space.
  • If you are an alien race that was exterminated by the Coalition, not even extinction will save you from experiencing the sheer horrors that the Coalition will put you through. In most cases, defeated aliens are forcefully de-evolved into cattle to have their body parts used by humans for commodity or military purposes. Just ask the Squeem, the Spline and the Silver Ghosts who found out the hard way after they were conquered/wiped out by Humanity.
    • To provide further context on how vile human depravity became. The Coalition was actively skinning Silver Ghost babies in front of their parents to turn them into solar sails, out of spite. In fact, the active hunting and butchering of fleeing Silver Ghost families was considered as a 'family bonding experience' for humans. Do take note that this was the early Coalition, before things truly became batshit.
  • The concept of family no longer exists. Completely deleted during the Qax extirpation and further enforced by the Druz Doctrine. Among other things that was effectively deleted from the human psyche was the notion of innovation, compassion, mutual understanding and even heroism. Even love is heavily frowned upon if not outright considered a near-capital offence and anti-doctrinal that will lead you to severe punishment if you do not have the right contacts.
  • The posthumans of the Coalescents who are described with rampant disgust and horror in the Sequence. Imagine a group of eusocial humans in which fertile girls are impregnated from the moment they start to menstruate and continue to give birth until they expire. Not only that, but the Coalition in all its hypocrisy, both enforce this behaviour and ignores its implication. It is effectively state-sanctioned child rape on a industrial scale.
  • If there is even the potential hint of dissent, it was standard protocol to completely destroy everything on it. When such a thing occurred on a heavily populated moon numbering in the billions, the Coalition simply dumped the entire moon into its parent gas giant. Just to make a statement. If you thought the Death Star from Star Wars and Exterminatus from Warhammer 40,000 was excessive and callous, this makes those two look humanitarian in comparison.
  • So many children were expended during the Coalition's campaign against the Xeelee that their names were literally etched a micron thick so the mausoleum won't run out of space.
  • The Coalition actually have the technology to make robots. The reason why they use children to dig out trenches and die in the trillions? Well, de jure it is to ensure that humanity stays human and there is nothing more human than digging your own trench and dying in it. De facto, it is because human life is that cheap that children are seen as a more disposable commodity than robots. This makes it all the more worse and outrageous when you realised that the Coalition do have a choice to make things better, they just chose not to do so due to ideological dogma. There are cheapskates and there is whatever the hell the Coalition is smoking.
  • If you are living in a Barack's Ball, you will be living a short and miserable life filled with other children. The closest thing to pleasure are giant orgies of children having sex with other children before they get sent out to die a horrible death against the Xeelee. One of the major side characters in Exultant was so shell-shocked in losing her sisters, that she went from a quirky Genki Girl to a near-mute suffering from depression in a span of a week.

The Posthuman Societies

• The riots on the Raft. Bathed in the blood-red light of the star overhead, Rees is trapped in a burning city gone mad where people he's known ever since his arrival are torn to pieces by the angry working class.
• Several societies of degenerate humans have made a living out of literally surviving in meatspheres made out of human remains.
  • The most infamous is the Mayflower II, where the immortal humans have basically turned the women into biological vending machines and sex slaves; forced to give birth to infants to feed the degenerate humans ad-Infinitum. The millions of skulls and bones decorating the Mayflower II end up being the corpses of said infants.
  • Then there is the Boneys which is a literal corpse sphere made out of human bones and flayed human skin. The denizens there literally eat the corpses that was dumped by the neighbouring generation ships.
  • Hundreds of thousands of years in the future, the human hives of the Coalescents have evolved into posthumans literally breathing and living in an ocean of shit and piss.
• During the story of Old Earth, there was a society of posthumans which literally became cattle to be used and harvested by the very weapons they made to defend themselves with. Said weapons grew sentience and de-evolved these humans to be slaughtered.
• The Post-Coalition human civilizations was just as monstrous and vile as its predecessor. Humanity splintered and bifurcated across the galaxy and later, the universe. Wars of genocide was waged between different segments of humanity, as entire human subspecies was created for the sole purpose of war. Hell, some subspecies of humans was created to simply commit mass suicide as they turn their home neutron star into a intergalactic missile. The only reason why humanity didn't completely destroy itself, is because they realise that there is alien life across the universe. So they made a truce, and went back to business. This time. Across the entire universe.
• The Transcendence, which is essentially a group of posthumans living in a virtual dreamworld, one-upped the Coalition in terms of xenocide by going on a mass killing spree across the entire universe. Eventually, they stopped at the Laniakea Supercluster when they encountered stiff resistance from the Xeelee. The Transcendence mind you, was using neutron stars as ballistic missiles and attempted to fold every single alternate timeline of humanity into one meta-reality regardless of any paradoxes and contradictions it would occur. They were also contemplating on erasing humanity from every reality just so they could, even despite the fact that they wouldn't exist without humanity in the first place.
  • This mind you, was before the Xeelee finally got fed up with humanity and decided to curbstomp the near god-like Transcendence back into the literal stone age. Every posthuman outside of Earth would have their homestar covered by trillions of Xeelee flowers, which caused 99% of humanity across the universe to freeze to death.
  • The Transcendence themselves are so posthuman that their morality resembles more of Cthulu than they do with regular humans. Even the insanity that is the Coalition would hardly consider the Transcendence 'human', which lay into the horrifying realisation of whether even the term humanity would survive in this bleak future.

The Rest of the Universe

• If you are a race that is endangered, you will attract poachers from all corners of the universe whose main job is literally causing your people's ''extinction''. There will be no mercy, no respite, no forgiveness in this brutal multiverse where profit, astropolitics and ideological dogma trumps all. Your people will DIE and they will die like DOGS.
• The Photino Birds. They are essentially the Xeeleeverse's Greater-Scope Villain, seeking to literally destroy the Universe as we know it to propagate their existence. And they actively resist the Xeelee leaving the Universe; they arrange galaxies to shake the Ring apart.
• Millions of years of humanity in a massive Hopeless War of attrition against the Xeelee who are also fighting a race of dark matter beings who want to render the universe unfit for baryonic life (like humanity). They lose. First the humans, then the Xeelee.
  • This is without considering the hundreds of thousands of intelligent life who were unfortunate enough to miss the deadline before Bolder's Ring was destroyed by the Photino Birds; dooming them to a slow death to extinction.
  • Well, at least the Xeelee not only managed to get the hell out of the doomed Universe, but also provided means for at least the remnants of humanity to escape. While some refugees from our Universe ended up in one that was practically unfit for human life, this wasn't any of the known evacuation groups, although whether even that is considered a 'good' ending is up to interpretation... Perhaps fortunately the main group of humans that does escape is a mostly normal bunch from the late 3000's (who end up in the far future due to Time dilation) and another that's mostly regained present day morality after millions of years in a giant Xeelee jail. That said they both end up in very young universe's where planets barely exist yet and while advanced the Great Northern group only has one FTL drive they can't yet duplicate and the prison group is stone age. Rebuilding human civilization is going to be very hard.

Other Shortstories

• During a short story, a group of humans managed to escape the Squeem occupation by hijacking an asteroid and equipping the rock with a GUT engine. The Squeem took notice of this and launched a self-improving GUT missile to track it down and destroy it. Every day, the surviving humans must slowly increase the speed of the asteroid in order to avoid being hit by the missile. The missile in turn also modified itself to increase its own speed. Since the missile is smaller, it has a better thrust-to-weight ratio, so the asteroid must exert even more thrust and therefore, more speed to escape this galactic cat-and-mouse game. The problem with this is that every time the asteroid goes a bit faster, the g-forces and inertia increases. It came to the point that the remaining humans who have yet to commit suicide, had fully uploaded their minds in a computer. Finally, after what appears to be centuries, the surviving humans managed to bait the missile into being dragged into a nearby blackhole; fully destroying it. Unfortunately for these poor sods, Stephen Baxter knows his physics and the increased thrust near lightspeed created immense time dilation. By the time the humans escaped the missile, millions of years have already passed by and they enter a dying universe; fully missing their chance in escaping via the Ring as the Photino Birds had fully conquered the bulk multiverse.