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Shop nowThe Ascension Factor
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Learn moreSet twenty-five years after The Lazarus Effect, this final book in the Destination: Void collaboration between Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom concludes the story of the planet Pandora.
Pandora's humans have been recovering land from its raging seas at an accelerated pace since The Lazarus Effect. The great kelp of the seas, sentient but electronically manipulated by humans, buffers Pandora's wild currents to restore land and facilitate the booming sea trade. New settlements rise overnight, but children starve in their shadows. An orbiting assembly station is near completion of Project Voidship, which is the hope of many for finding a better world.
Pandora is under the fist of an ambitious clone from hibernation called the Director, who rules with a sadistic security force led by the assassin Spider Nevi. Small resistance groups have had little effect on his absolute power. The Director controls the transportation of foodstuffs; uprisings are punished with starvation.
The resistance fighters' main hope is Crista Galli, a woman believed by some to be the child of God. Crista pools her talents with Dwarf MacIntosh, Beatriz Tatoosh, and Rico LaPush to transcend the barriers between the different species and overthrow the Director and the sinister cabal with which he rules.
Frank Herbert's speculative fictions have taken the grand themes and questions of politics, ecology, overpopulation, and much more and applied them to the human drama. His most popular works are the well-known Dune books: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and the extraordinary bestseller God Emperor of Dune. He wrote more than twenty other works of fiction and nonfiction, including a book on home computers, before his death in 1986.
Bill Ransom was born in Puyallup, Washington, in 1945 and began full-time employment at the age of eleven as an agricultural worker. He has since earned two college degrees and has held a variety of jobs, including as a firefighter and a CPR instructor. He began a pilot project with the Poetry in the Schools program in Washington State and founded and directed the popular Port Townsend Writers Conference for Centrum. His poetry has been nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Scott Brick has recorded over five hundred audiobooks, has won over forty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has twice received Audie Awards for his work on the Dune series. He has been proclaimed both a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine and Publishers Weekly's 2007 Narrator of the Year. Scott has recorded Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive, Whipping Star, The Dragon in the Sea, and The White Plague for Tantor Audio.
Reviews
“More life-and-death struggles on planet Pandora…The details are fresh but the territory familiar…Fans won’t pass this one up.”
“This final collaboration between the late Herbert and Ransom is a worthy sequel to their novel The Lazarus Effect…The thematic richness one associates with Herbert is again present, here centering on mind-body dislocations, from the torture victims driven mad to the bodyless brains in cyborgs, and Crista herself.”
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