Synopsis
Planets at the edge of the Federation have been falling
mysteriously silent. The arrogant and recalcitrant bureaucracy running the
Federation grudgingly allows two transcended humans, Riley and Asha, to
investigate. They join forces with the Earth's Pedia, a global A.I., along with
Tordor, a Dorian representative of the Federation, and Adithya, a member of a
splinter group vowing to destroy the Pedia. No one on the team trusts one
another.
They must find a common ground and the answer to the planetary silences in
order to confront an enemy more ancient than the Transcendentals and more
powerful than any Pedia.
Praise for TRANSCENDENTAL
“Jim Gunn doesn’t publish a new novel very often, but when he does it’s a
whopper. Transcendental is his best yet, and in it he demonstrates his
possession of one of the most finely developed skills at world-building (and at
aliens-creating to populate those worlds) in science fiction today. Read it!” —Frederik
Pohl, bestselling author of Gateway
“James Gunn, after a long, stellar career in science fiction, is a master of
the narrative art—as he shows in this Chaucerian pilgrimage through the
galactic future.” —Robert Silverberg, bestselling author of Lord
Valentine’s Castle
Praise for JAMES GUNN
“Reads more like a collaboration between Heinlein and Asimov. The concept is
pure, classic science fiction.” —New York TimesBook Review
on Star Bridge
“Its characters, at least the protagonists, are drawn with psychological depth.
The charm and vividness of Gunn’s prose, plus his deft hand at keeping his plot
moving, will keep readers on board through the end. The recent saga of Occupy
Wall Street and the other Occupy movements around the country makes many of the
events and actors of Kampus feel very current.” —Fantastical Andrew Fox
“One of the very best portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence
ever written.” —Carl Sagan on The Listeners
Excerpt:
CHAPTER
ONE
The invasion began a million or more long-cycles ago, but
the galaxy is bigger than minds can encompass, and information crawls across
interstellar space if it moves at all. The Galactic Federation was slow to
recognize the nature of the danger.
The Galactic Federation is a misnomer. It actually
occupies only a single spiral arm of the local galaxy that humans call “the
Milky Way,” although in recent long-cycles explorations began into the
neighboring spiral arm in search of what had become known as the Transcendental
Machine. So it is not surprising that the invasion went unnoticed until remote
worlds of the Federation began to fall silent, sending out no capsule messages
through the network of nexus points that made interstellar travel and
communication possible, and failing to acknowledge those sent as routine
reports or inquiries.
Finally, bureaucracy stirred and dispatched automated
survey ships and, when they did not return, ships staffed with representatives
of the various species that made up the Federation. They, too, went missing
until, at last, a single damaged vessel appeared in a space monitored by
Federation Central and remained motionless where it had materialized from a
nexus point. When it was finally reached and boarded, investigators found its
crew dead except for a single survivor, the captain.
He was a Dorian and his guttural voice was recorded
before he died. “They are all dead, all dead,” he said. It wasn’t clear to his
rescuers whether he was referring to his crew or the inhabitants of the planets
they surveyed. “We brought them into the ship, thinking they were evidence of
what had happened, maybe recordings, our science officer said. But they must
have been poisoned. They were sterilized, you know, according to protocol. We
did everything by protocol. They swarmed out, unseen but we knew they were
there by what happened. The crew went mad, you see. The invisible creatures did
that, and the crew turned upon each other as if they were trying to get away.
But they couldn’t until they all were dead. All dead.”
The investigators found no evidence in the ship’s
automated records about invaders, only recordings of the crew killing each
other with their bare hands and anything they could tear away from the ship to
use as weapons. The ship had returned only because the captain had programmed
instructions to be executed automatically in case of emergency.
Finally Federation Central began to take seriously the
possibility that something mysterious and possibly invisible had emerged in the
unexplored spiral arms of the galaxy, or had entered the galaxy from somewhere
beyond the zone of thinning stars and the beginning of intergalactic space.
Three long-cycles later the news reached Riley and Asha and the Pedia at the
heart of the human world.
Asha sent a message to Riley: “Get in touch about silent
stars. Pedia says invasion is 92.4 percent likely.”
Riley turned to a rejuvenated Jak in his subsurface lunar
laboratory. Jak was a mad scientist, who had turned his own clones into agents
in the quest for the Transcendental Machine. Riley had entrusted Jak with the
matter-transmission process that had led to transcendence. It was an act of
blind trust if not even hubris—Jak was a mad scientist but he was Riley’s mad
scientist. Now, with a copy of the Transcendental Machine reproduced in Jak’s
laboratory, Jak had been his own experimental subject, followed by his daughter
Jer, and the process had restored Jak’s health if not his youth. He was still
mad, only not as desperate.
The laboratory itself was much as it had been when Riley
had told Jak and Jer about the Transcendental Machine and left with them the
red sphere that he had discovered on the primitive planet where the
Transcendental Machine had stranded him, where dinosaurs had survived or
avoided the catastrophes that had destroyed their kind, or their evolutionary
equivalents, on other worlds. The red sphere had survived the millennia as
well, the only known artifact in this arm of the galaxy of the creatures who
had created the Transcendental Machine. Perhaps it held their secrets as well.
But now the laboratory was filled with the machinery of
transcendence.
“The Pedia thinks the galaxy has been invaded,” Riley
said.
“The Pedia doesn’t think,” Jak said. “It calculates.”
“Still—”
“Its calculations are usually accurate, although limited
by a lack of imagination.”
“So—you think there is an invasion?”
Jak shrugged. “That’s a matter of definition. The galaxy
is big and vast spiral arms are unexplored, even unapproached, like the ‘terra
incognita’ of deepest Africa in the nineteenth century. So who knows what may
lurk in the vast unknown, like the culture that created the Transcendental
Machine, until it bursts into our sphere of awareness.”
“Your point is that it doesn’t matter whether it is
native to our galaxy or from another galaxy?”
Jak shrugged again. He was clearly bored with this line
of discussion. He bored easily, when it was not his idea.
“But surely what does matter is whether we are being
invaded.”
“We?” Jak said. “It’s the Federation’s problem.”
“But what if the Federation is overmatched?”
“We’ll all be long dead before it affects our little corner
of the galaxy,” Jak said. “If it ever does. The galaxy is far bigger and its
stars are far more distant from each other than any of us—even me—can imagine.
Our system is remote and in an impoverished neighborhood. It might easily be
overlooked.”
“And that’s reason enough not to be concerned?”
“The Pedia has to be concerned,” Jak said. “That’s its
categorical imperative: the welfare of the human species. That’s what I mean by
a lack of imagination. We have other choices. And wasting my limited moments of
existence on a possible invasion in the remote future by unknown creatures is
not one of them.”
“So you think it’s possible?”
“Oh, I think it’s likely. As I said, the Pedia’s
calculations are pretty accurate, and it has greater calculating power than
anything this side of Federation Central itself. I just choose not to get
involved.”
Riley nodded and made arrangements to return to Earth. He
would deal with Jak later.
Copyright
© 2017 by James Gunn
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JAMES GUNN is the Hugo
Award–winning author of Transcendental, Transgalactic, and The Listeners, and
the coauthor, with Jack Williamson, of the classic epic SF novel Star Bridge.
He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where he is professor emeritus of English at the
University of Kansas. He is the founding director of the university's Center
for the Study of Science Fiction. Gunn is also one of the last living
Grandmaster Award winners from the golden age of science fiction. www.sfcenter.ku.edu
Giveaway:
--Giveaway is open to International. | Must be 13+ to
Enter
- 5 Winners will receive a Set of the
Trilogy (TRANSCENDENTAL in Trade Paperback, TRANSGALACTIC in Hardcover, and TRANSFORMATION
in hardcover).
0 comments:
Post a Comment