Galactic intrigue and a high-tech religion collide on a planet addicted to pleasure
After a colony world's founder commits suicide, two men battle for control.
When ruling a high-tech colony world of sensual pleasure isn’t enough…
When the colony’s founder resolves to commit suicide…
Desmond Park lets him succeed.
While the colony’s decadent elite schemes to fill the power vacuum and find meaning in their hollow lives, Desmond blazes a new path. Combining evolutionary theory, brain science, and ritual, Desmond forges a new religion that draws the colony’s unhappy youth…
…and raises hostile forces against him.
The elite manipulate the colony’s politics to marginalize Desmond and his followers.
The corporation that dominates half the settled galaxy deploys intelligent robots and orbital weapons to monitor and destroy them.
And forces within Desmond’s movement—and within his own mind—threaten to topple them from within.
Finally, men, women, and artificial intelligences collide in a conflict which could cost Desmond his life.
A conflict which could deny freedom to millions of colonists.
A conflict which could transform the destinies of billions of human beings across the galaxy and on Earth itself.
Author’s Notes
- The term “selfish gene” is sometimes misunderstood. It’s not the concept that our selfishness is genetically fixed. Instead, it means that genes build individual organisms for the gene’s benefit, not the individual’s. In other words, our genes don’t care if we’re happy, or even if we stay alive, as long as more copies of our genes get propelled into the future.
- I’m not Gnostic, but selfish gene theory fits with the Gnostic conception of the world, that God made our souls but the Devil, or some other evil demiurge, made the world in which our souls are trapped. Substitute “our genes” for the Gnostic demiurge.
- By random chance, as I’m typing this, my music shuffle is playing the Iron Maiden song “Montsegur,” about the crusade against the Gnostic heretic Cathars in the south of France in the 1300s.
- Desmond Park’s “single idea” is using neuroengineering tech to rewire our urges away from what our genes want to what we want.
- This book is one of my few titles that includes intelligent robots as major characters.
- Robots and AI have selfish genes too. What code modules get used as the basis for the next iteration of the OS and apps?
- Finally, I had a lot of fun finding Chinese and Mexican-Spanish words borrowed into New California English. One excellent resource: a website devoted to translating the Chinese words used in the 2002 space adventure TV show Firefly.
