Neverness
An epic masterwork of science fiction, Neverness is a stand-alone novel from one of the most important talents in the genre.
The universe of Neverness is intriguingly complex and filled with extraordinary beings. There are the Alaloi, whose genes have ‘backmutated’ so that they look like Neanderthals… the Order of Pilots, which reworks the laws of time and physics to slingshot its members through dense regions of ‘thickspace’… the Solid State Entity, a nebula-sized brain made up of moon-sized biocomputers…
Against this backdrop stands Mallory Ringer, the headstrong novitiate of the Order of Pilots, who, against all odds, navigates a maze of interspatial passageways to penetrate the Solid State Entity. There he makes a stunning discovery. A discovery that could unlock the secret of immortality hidden among the Alaloi.
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DAVID ZINDELL
Neverness
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events of localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperVoyager
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First published in Great Britain by Grafton 1988
Copyright © David Zindell 1988
David Zindell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007305179
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2016 ISBN: 9780007397952
Version: 2016-09-01
Neverness is Zindell’s highly acclaimed first novel. A reviewer in the New Scientist wrote of it in 1992: ‘David Zindell writes of interstellar mathematics in poetic prose that is a joy to read’.
His second novel, The Broken God, Book One of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens, is a sequel to Neverness. It has been hailed as Dune for the 1990s and was equally well-received: ‘SF as it ought to be: challenging, imaginative, thought-provoking and well-written. Zindell has placed himself at the forefront of literary SF’.
Times Literary Supplement
The Wild, Book Two of A Requiem for Homo Sapiens was also published to great acclaim: ‘A disturbing vision of the impending collapse of a transgalactic society … the ideas are hard SF with philosophical undertones, and the story is compelling’.
New Scientist
Zindell has completed A Requiem for Homo Sapiens with War in Heaven, available now, in hardback. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.
For Melody
On Old Earth the ancients often wondered at the origin of life, and they created many myths to explain the mystery of mysteries. There was Mumu the mother goddess who swallowed a great snake which multiplied inside of her and whose nine billion children ate their way through her belly into the light of day and so became the animals of the land and the fishes of the sea. There was a father god, Yahweh, who created Earth and the heavens in six days and who called forth the birds and the beasts on days five and six. There was a fertility goddess and a goddess of chance named Random Mutation. And so on. And so on. The truth is, life throughout the galaxy was everywhere seeded by a race known as the Ieldra. Of course the origin of the Ieldra is unknown and perhaps unknowable; the ultimate mystery remains.
from A Requiem for Homo Sapiens by Horthy Hosthoh, Timekeeper and Lord Horologe of the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame
There is infinite hope, but not for Man.
Franz Kafka, Holocaust Century Fabulist
Long before we knew that the price of the wisdom and immortality we sought would be almost beyond our means to pay, when man – what was left of man – was still like a child playing with pebbles and shells by the seashore, in the time of the quest for the mystery known as the Elder Eddas, I heard the call of the stars and prepared to leave the city of my birth and death.
I call her Neverness. The founders of our Order, so the Timekeeper once told me, having discovered a neighbourhood of space where the pathways through the manifold twist and loop together like a hard knot of string, decided to build our city on a nearby planet named Icefall. Because such knots of space were once thought to be rare or nonexistent – the cantors now call them thickspace – our first Timekeeper declared that we could fall through the galaxy until the universe collapsed inward upon itself and never find a denser thickspace. How many billions of pathways converge around our cool yellow star no one knows. There are probably an infinite number of them. The ancient cantors, believing that their theorems proved the impossibility of an infinite thickspace, had predicted that our pilots would never find the topological nexus that they sought. So when our first Lord Pilot had fallen out of the manifold above the small, cold, mountainous island that was to shelter our beloved and doomed city, he named her Neverness, in mockery of the nay-saying academicians. Of course to this day the cantors call her the Unreal City, but few pay them much attention. I, Mallory Ringess, whose duty it is to set forth here the history of the golden age and great crisis of our Order, shall follow the tradition of the pilots who came before me. Neverness – so I knew her as a child when I entered the novitiate such a short time ago; Neverness I call her now; Neverness she will always remain.
