(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa)

With War in Heaven (1998), David Zindell has concluded one of the most extraordinary narratives in SF history. What makes the Neverness Quartet (as one might dub War in Heaven and its three predecessors) so remarkable is that it is, simultaneously, an admirably ambitious, luminously poetic work of philosophical space opera and an interminable religiose wallow. When Zindell is creatively inspired, he is one of SF’s paragons; when his attention preachily wanders, the result is a shambles. Rarely has a major SF series been so rewarding – or so dismaying.

The explanation for this paradox may lie in Zindell’s ultimate source of inspiration. But first, in introduction: Neverness (1988) initiated a future history of intense complexity: thousands of years from now, the mystical Academy in the city Neverness supplies starship pilots and ingenious savants to a galaxy populous with humanity; the narrator, Mallory Ringess, is a great pilot whose quest for the secret of godhood leads him among cosmic deities and serene primitives. Neverness is an expansive, shrewd, colourful reworking of earlier genre material, boasting gnomic chapter epigraphs out of Frank Herbert, aliens a la Silverberg, stylistic exuberance after Delany, exoticism according to Vance. This alluring and allusive formula continues in the ‘A Requiem for Homo Sapiens’, the successor trilogy composed of The Broken God (1993), The Wild (1995), and War in Heaven; here, Mallory’s son, Danlo, must solve the enigmas of life and transcendence as he trains as a pilot in Neverness, journeys countless light years to persuade star-killing fanatics to see reason, and finally returns to Neverness to prevent his soul brother from corrupting all life and destroying the universe. Concerns of genuine import are at stake; the narrative delivers a rich succession of densely told confrontations, trials, and epiphanies. Characterizations are strong; settings resonate with history and with myth. This is all to the good; but the bad must also be acknowledged; and both can, as indicated earlier, be seen as resulting from Zindell’s chief influence. This is Gene Wolfe.

In his The Book of the New Sun (1980-3), Wolfe succeeded in many purposes; among other things, he told a quest tale that summed up all previous SF and, in so doing, proclaimed, subtly but emphatically, Wolfe’s religious Belief. Zindell, whose work often reads like an homage to Wolfe, has attempted, with absolute dedication, to repeat this feat. This helps explain Zindell’s commendable traits of thematic seriousness and sensitivity to SF’s genre nuances. But where Wolfe implies his creed, Zindell asserts his; where Wolfe’s theology is almost subliminal, Zindell blares forth sermons. Danlo Ringess undergoes interminable sequences of Significant Visions, rendered, often incoherently, in a tangled symbolic language, whose peculiarly impoverished vocabulary often seems to consist of little more than invocations of fire, stars, wind, sky, birds, and worms. So confident is Zindell that his advocacy of a kind of transcendent pantheistic vitalism is a necessary gospel to his readers that his judgement as a writer is undermined. His text becomes bloated, lazily repetitious. His message – the persistence and evolving continuity of life – is hardly profound, yet it hectoringly pervades four volumes totalling over two thousand pages. Zindell’s good writing is so good that he must be read; but the bad that comes with the good is often very bad indeed.

BANTAM SPECTRA (USA). 1998. PAPERBACK.