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 celebration 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.