Resplendent is an English language science fiction collection published in 2006. It is the fourth and final book in Stephen Baxter's Destiny's Children series.
This book is a collection of short stories relating to the previous three books, comprising new works and previously-published stories, including the novellas Reality Dust and Riding the Rock and Mayflower II, an 88-page novella taking place in the Xeelee Sequence that won the 2004 BSFA Award for the Best Short Fiction; it was published in 2004.
It contains the following stories:
- “Cadre Siblings”, Interzone 153, 2000-03.
- Reality Dust, 2000.
- “Silver Ghost”, Asimov’s, 2000-09.
- “On the Orion Line”, Asimov’s, 2000-10.
- “In the Un-Black”, Redshift, 2001.
- “The Ghost Pit”, Asimov’s, 2001-07.
- “The Cold Sink”, Asimov’s, 2001-08.
- “Breeding Ground”, Asimov’s, 2003-02.
- “The Great Game”, Asimov’s, 2003-03.
- “The Chop Line”, Asimov’s, 2003-12.
- “The Dreaming Mould”, Interzone 179, 2002-05.
- “Conurbation 2473”, Live without a Net, 2003-08.
- “All in a Blaze”, Stars: Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian, 2003.
- Riding the Rock, 2002-11.
- “Lakes of Light”, Constellations, 2005.
- “Between Worlds”, Between Worlds, September 2004.
- Mayflower II, 2004-08.
The plot of Mayflower II is about five generation ships leaving a doomed plant. As thousands of years pass, the humans forget that they are on a spaceship and begin running its mechanisms only through religious ritual. After 25,000 years, the humans on the ship have split in their evolution with half becoming short-lived childlike tribal people and half becoming cannibalistic animals. The ending speaks to the fact that although this situation seems gruesome and terrible that life and evolution find a way and that humans found a way to continue on living even if it meant giving up what is traditionally thought of as human.
- “Ghost Wars”, Asimov’s, 2006-01.