After reading a lot of articles on Reddit about Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, the consensus was that his novels are an "acquired taste" and not for everyone who doesn't feel like waddling through dozens of pages of bad prose while tries and fails to build relatable characters. The Reddit users recommended his "connected" collection of short stories "Vacuum Diagrams".
This collection consists of many short stories written over the span of decades, most of them connected to the Xeelee, at least tangentially, and brought together by the first story where the Silver Ghosts are conducting a new forbidden experiment, and the protagonist's dead wife retells him the entire human story in the current universe, starting from billions of years ago and finishing a billion years in the future when the Photino Birds finally win and extinguish all Baryonic matter in this universe.
Some of the stories are silly, and can be seen that they were written long time ago, when the author was young. Some are pretty good, but overall it is a very enjoyable book, since each story (almost) has different characters which cannot be developed in the given length, so you don't really miss them as you would in a novel.
Many of the stories are the beginnings of the large novels Baxter wrote. For example, the story "Raft" is the first chapter of the novel "Raft". If you enjoy the Xeelee concept with its technology on a super-advanced level that is barely comprehensible today, but do not want to wade through thousands of pages of boring characters as in the novels - this book gives you an overview of the entire timeline and just the nuggets you want.
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