The Wild

Why are the stars of the Milky Way exploding into supernovas, and how can the destruction of the galaxy be stopped?

Along with ten elite lightship pilots seeking the answer to this question, Danlo wi Soli Ringess sets out into the blasted, burned-out region of space known as the Vild in Book Three of David Zindell’s epic science fiction series, The Neverness Cycle. Although the Order of Mystic Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame has sent him, Danlo has more personal reasons for making this quest: Do the Architects of the Cybernetic Universal Church, who engineered the virus that killed his tribe, know of a cure for the terrible plague that promises to wipe out the rest of his people? And did his father, Mallory Ringess, die during the first mission to the Vild or did he become a god?

In his epic journey into the unmapped regions of the galaxy, he faces many challenges. A warrior-poet named Malaclypse Redring, charged with killing all potential gods, pursues him across the stars. The immensely powerful Solid State Entity creates a replica of Old Earth and tests his ability to discern the real from the unreal. In order to survive the strange mathematical spaces of the manifold and other surrealities, he must master the cybernetic senses of iconicity, syntaxis, and gestalt, as well as fractality, fugue, and fenestration. And on a lost world in the heart of the Vild, he must call upon all that he has learned in order to look into the blinding supernova of his own consciousness and so win the admiration of his enemies and gain a godly power, either that or die…