Facing death
On a far-away, recently colonized planet, an accidental rift in reality creates a bridge between the world of the living and whatever strange dimension the souls of people go after death. This dysfunction allows the lucky souls that manage to cross the rift to possess living bodies - if the proper conditions are met. This usually means that the person to be possessed is being tortured by another possessed in order to diminish its willpower, making it susceptible to possession.
Once possessed, the original soul is banished into a dark corner of the mind as the possessor takes-over the control of the body (usually to have lots of perverse sex whenever possible). Somehow, through some unknown interaction with the reality dysfunction, the possessed are all endowed with supernatural powers. These range from super-human strengths; the power to shoot white flames; telepathy with the rest of the possesses and the ability to heal themselves, change their appearance at will or to transform the shape and apparent substance of any object such as transforming a book into a loaf of bread).
Through the systematic use of torture, these seemingly indestructible super-humans can possess the entire population of planets at exponential speed. Faced with such an improbable threat, humanity struggles with the ethical and logistical issues of preventing this curse from spreading like wildfire throughout the Confederation of Planets. The vague and mystical warnings of their allied alien species are no help as worlds upon worlds are lost to the possessed.
This is the ultimate challenge to a technology-oriented society, as everyone must now deal with the fact that souls actually exist and that the apparent fate of everyone after death is to spend eternity as a disembodied spirit. As more evidence that similar incidents have happened to other alien species and that not all of them were successful in dealing with this invasion, humanity must face this challenge head-on and find a permanent solution - quickly! Will technology find a solution? Can the fabled Naked God be of any help, if it can be found? Will the evil Quinn Dexter manage to use his newfound powers to bring about the fall of humanity? Can the dashing and extremely lucky space captain Josh Calvert save the day?
But are all possessed evil? How can we stop their onslaught without killing the innocent people they are possessing? What would happen if Al Capone came back and took over a whole planet? Can the Edenist living spaceships and their kilometers-long living habitats be possessed? Will the Edenists find a way to help their less fortunate Adamist friends or fall themselves under the onslaught of the possessed? What is the nature of death? Does everyone end up in this nightmarish afterworld upon death? Why are there no Edenists among the possessors?
Conflicts and contrasts
This is a story of contrasts. In these books we get to witness some truly barbaric acts of cruelty as well as seeing glimpses of a culture whose very technology is based on love. The human Confederation of Planets is also composed of two vastly different cultures: the nano-technology enhanced Adamists (who are actually the high-tech continuation of our current western/capitalist culture) and the communal, quasi-telepathic Edensists, who use bitek (bio-technology) to create kilometers-long sentient space-habitats and faster-than-light living spaceship.
It is also about the relationship between humanity and a handful of alien space civilization, all very different from one another. It is about the living and the dead. (Who’s right is it to get to experience and feel the world anyway? The living have no right to keep it all to themselves!) It is about good and evil; unselfish love and burning hate; technology and spirituality; kick-ass space battles and the social costs of widespread possession.
Space-opera at its best
Anyone who got a rise out of the space battles and high-tech combat featured in the classic Hyperion saga should stop reading this review right now, run to their bookstore and grab whatever copies they can find of the Night’s Dawn series. Whoever enjoyed the complex alien cultures from Larry Niven’s universe should also do the same. Ditto to you, horror aficionados.
Since my purchase on a whim of “The Neutronium Alchemist, volume one” two years ago, I have already gone twice through the six paperback volumes of this “trilogy” and will likely read them all over many times again. The fact that I had unknowingly begun roughly halfway into the storyline has not been an obstacle in enjoying the book (I should have bought “The Reality Dysfunction, volume one instead. The numbering of the three pairs of volumes is somewhat confusing.) In fact, having no idea of what was going on as I tore into the first chapters made the story even scarier!
If you’re looking for a couple of thousand pages of “science-tethered flights of fancy [1]”, you can hardly fail with these books!
