'transcendent' paints an interesting future, climate change has ravaged the planet yet we are doing okay, smart technological solutions are applied, life still finds a way, the geography has dramatically changed, countries are no longer subjected to traditional climates or landscapes. i'm enjoying descriptions of 'the reef' which is outside seville, a place where all the cars were dumped. baxter writes of a huge wall of cars, almost a graveyard.
he describes how the whole city became a dump, and as the people moved out refugees from north africa moved in, inhabiting the whole area, making use of the stuff that had been left and a whole new society evolves. there's new insects species evolving, they live on rust, eat it and turn it into something organic, there's a certain ingenuity humans bring to these extreme conditions and along with the way evolution works, it's extremely fast under adverse conditions, a couple of generations.
the communities that live in these places all exhibit slight 'hive' behaviours, they swarm, communicate by mimicry and hardly use language via speech. baxter's idea of hive society started in 'coalescent' around the fall of rome to AD2005 but he's taken the idea further and in transcendent which is set in two time periods, AD2047 and AD500000 we see at the end of time hives operating in incredibly imaginative yet in human ways, the evolution is incredible, the furthest reaches of space colonised by these hive societies where function is pre determined, where a handful of mothers act like queens and give birth to hundreds of children, where the hive is connected to all other hives, even off world, all serving the ultimate in human evolution, the transcendence, a human that has evolved to it's endpoint and now reflects on the past, the humanity that came before it, the ones that suffered and knew pain. and the transcendents would like to heal that wound, for how can they be free when they are aware of the suffering it took to reach the point they are at. 
i have to say i was reluctant to start baxter, he's to old school for me, classic science fiction, the stuff i read when i was 15, asimov, heinlien, ee doc smith, from the golden age, but this series has a certain grunge that i like, yet it is filled with ideas, baxter is an ideas man, i love that he's got the solutions, they are really elegant, i like his characters although people criticise them for being to dry, and they don't like the dialogue, they don't like the density. i like the story and i'm enjoying where it takes me, it's a series of possibilities where the future travels to the past and all humanity can be potentially healed.