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A Requiem for Homo Sapiens #2
The Wild
Danlo the Wild, the extraordinary son of Mallory Ringess, pursues the apocalyptic Architects of the Universal Cybernetic Church into the Vild. Far from Neverness where Danlo trained as a pilot, they kill stars, use humans to reshape matter and energy. In the Vild, Danlo meets the insane god who wants to destroy everything.
704 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 29, 2019
Wow! A brand new electronic edition of the book that has shaped me the most as a human being. What can I say?
... Well, quite a lot actually. Especially if you can read Bulgarian. ;)
Addendum from 13 March: War in Heaven is here too. :) And I believe the money goes straight to the author, if you buy these Smashwords editions.
... Well, quite a lot actually. Especially if you can read Bulgarian. ;)
Addendum from 13 March: War in Heaven is here too. :) And I believe the money goes straight to the author, if you buy these Smashwords editions.
November 14, 2020
This next book in the Requiem for Homo Sapiens is just as wild as the previous two.
I don't often see books like this. It's full space-opera, but by way of The Odyssey by way of debunking various far-future searching for God.
But, of course, gods are a relative thing when thousands of years in the future, adding so many high-tech paths to enlightenment, physical power, and ways of thought (including electronic immortality, the stars in the center of the galaxy blowing up, a stellar cloud being a solid-state machine intelligence or even clusters of Dyson spheres being evacuated).
And below it all, ancient wars between uber-powerful races of humanity still feel fresh. Vital. And Danlo only wants to stay true to his belief in humanity. Of living life. High-tech nirvana, extreme maths, exploring ever-deeper parts of the galaxy, and reconnecting with ancient high-tech civilizations devoted to turning themselves into various versions of gods is the name of the game.
The Architects, in particular, are just as thoroughly imagined as Neverness was. Reading this book pretty much blew me away.
Whether it's a search for a cure for his people or the deification of his father or just wanting to get an answer for how BROKEN this universe is, Danlo's quest is timeless, rather MORE impressive than any other book I've read, and these have suddenly become a candidate for one of my top-favorite series of all time.
I don't often see books like this. It's full space-opera, but by way of The Odyssey by way of debunking various far-future searching for God.
But, of course, gods are a relative thing when thousands of years in the future, adding so many high-tech paths to enlightenment, physical power, and ways of thought (including electronic immortality, the stars in the center of the galaxy blowing up, a stellar cloud being a solid-state machine intelligence or even clusters of Dyson spheres being evacuated).
And below it all, ancient wars between uber-powerful races of humanity still feel fresh. Vital. And Danlo only wants to stay true to his belief in humanity. Of living life. High-tech nirvana, extreme maths, exploring ever-deeper parts of the galaxy, and reconnecting with ancient high-tech civilizations devoted to turning themselves into various versions of gods is the name of the game.
The Architects, in particular, are just as thoroughly imagined as Neverness was. Reading this book pretty much blew me away.
Whether it's a search for a cure for his people or the deification of his father or just wanting to get an answer for how BROKEN this universe is, Danlo's quest is timeless, rather MORE impressive than any other book I've read, and these have suddenly become a candidate for one of my top-favorite series of all time.
September 4, 2017
Such fantastic writing. Conceptual sci-fi, combined with philosophy and existentialism. It's not always easy to read it, and accept the outcome, or at least the events as you read them..but well worth it.
January 30, 2008
Part two in the series "A requiem for Homo Sapiens". So you should read The Broken God first. Zindell has an amazing imagination. The pacifist-as-hero concept is virtually unique. (Is Reave the Just a pacifist?) Zindell conveys an impressive sense of scale to his universe. Full marks.
February 10, 2015
Adventure adventure adventure. Awesome awesome awesome.
October 21, 2020
Danlo is still annoying perfect, but the EPIC SPACE QUEST is badass.
June 12, 2018
Zindell writes well and his universe is incredibly well-realized. For me this volume is best, truly insightfull and brilliant. "Neverness" was great, "The Broken God" started well, but got comparatively weak towards the end, "The Wild" is absolutely wonderful. Its strange how one book (or rather a trilogy) can change the way you look at sci-fi.
March 29, 2013
simply fantastic a must read
December 9, 2022
Part of the sequel to Neverness, Zindell’s epic space opera continues to deliver a profound metaphysical meditation on what it means to be human.
Warning: spoiler alert!!
The Wild is the second book in David Zindell’s trilogy A Requiem for Homo Sapiens (1993-1998), the sequel to Neverness (1988). Now that Danlo has become a pilot of the Order, The Wild moves on to trace Danlo’s quest to discover the Elder Eddas and find the Architects thought to be responsible for destroying the stars of the galaxy. Zindell’s epic space opera interrogates the pressures placed on what it means to be human in the face of ever advancing technology.
As the exploding stars in the remote part of the Milky Way known as the Vild now pose an immediate threat, even in far-away city of Neverness, the Order launches a major expedition into the Vild. It is hoped that contact and ultimately rapport can be established with the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church, thought to inhabit the planet of Tannahill. At this point the Architects are presented as just another version of a technological singularity, their ultimate aim to consume and remake the whole of the Universe in the name of the God, Ede.
Like his father before him, Danlo ventures into space alone, and most of the narrative is concerned with his travels. What unfolds is a picture of the galaxy where different machine gods have been at war for eons, a cycle of eternal recurrence. He learns that the Ieldras were once engaged in a bitter war with the the machine god, the Dark God, and that the secret to their victory is encoded in racial memory, the Elder Eddas. He also learns that the current scourge of the galaxy, the Silicon God, defeated the God of Ede 3,000 years ago, and is now propping up the Architects’ plan to convert all matter in the universe, transforming it into new earths and populating them with redesigned, perfected humans. It transpires that not even the Silicon God is free from the human condition, hating the humans for creating him in the first place, destined to live a life in perpetual agony. The Silicon God’s scheme, known as the Program of Totality, is thus a variation of Hanuman’s efforts to rid humanity of the the human condition, a flesh-version of pure bliss. When Danlo discovers the defeated God of Ede, now confined to a small computer, a similar picture is revealed. Ede has had enough of technological transcendence, the artificiality of life, and only wants to return to his human form. The all-too-human nature of machine-god wars are mirrored in the all-too-human religious wars, past and present. On his journey through the Architects’ worlds Danlo learns that Narain heretics broke away from the Tannahill Architects to set up their own ‘true’ version of Edeism, the main point of contention being whether man should be allowed to strive for godhood. And this is after a previous schism – culminating in the War of the Faces – had forced a faction of Tannahill Architects to flee into the remote region of the Vild.
All the while, Danlo’s struggle to embrace the human condition is tested to the extreme. The Solid State Entity, a nebulae of moon-sized machine gods, now at war with the Silicon God and thus sympathetic to Danlo’s cause, transports Danlo to a replica of Old Earth and disguises herself as a replica of Danlo’s girlfriend, Tamara who had her mind cleansed of any memory of Danlo in The Broken God (1993). Like the God of Ede, the Solid State Entity has its feeble beginnings in the brain upload of just one human being, Kalinda, but now, more than 3,000 years later, it spans a whole nebulae, more than 100 light years across. Like Ede, the Solid State Entity also struggles with technological transcendence and has created Tamara as much to experience Danlo’s love. Danlo struggles with the artificiality of the Tamara construct, however real she might appear, and while he is tempted to reunite with his lost love, he ultimately ends up reconfirming his belief in embracing the human condition, in what is essentially an internalisation of Friederich Nietzsche’s concept of self-overcoming:
“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
Friederich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditation (1873)
At the end of the day, Danlo stands firm and refuses the computer-aided transcendental short cuts on offer, whether it is Hanuman’s attempt to create a simulated meta-life of pure bliss or any of the escapist religions proffered by cybernetic churches. He does not believe in quickening or vastening – he believes in deepening only.
Warning: spoiler alert!!
The Wild is the second book in David Zindell’s trilogy A Requiem for Homo Sapiens (1993-1998), the sequel to Neverness (1988). Now that Danlo has become a pilot of the Order, The Wild moves on to trace Danlo’s quest to discover the Elder Eddas and find the Architects thought to be responsible for destroying the stars of the galaxy. Zindell’s epic space opera interrogates the pressures placed on what it means to be human in the face of ever advancing technology.
As the exploding stars in the remote part of the Milky Way known as the Vild now pose an immediate threat, even in far-away city of Neverness, the Order launches a major expedition into the Vild. It is hoped that contact and ultimately rapport can be established with the Architects of the Infinite Intelligence of the Cybernetic Universal Church, thought to inhabit the planet of Tannahill. At this point the Architects are presented as just another version of a technological singularity, their ultimate aim to consume and remake the whole of the Universe in the name of the God, Ede.
Like his father before him, Danlo ventures into space alone, and most of the narrative is concerned with his travels. What unfolds is a picture of the galaxy where different machine gods have been at war for eons, a cycle of eternal recurrence. He learns that the Ieldras were once engaged in a bitter war with the the machine god, the Dark God, and that the secret to their victory is encoded in racial memory, the Elder Eddas. He also learns that the current scourge of the galaxy, the Silicon God, defeated the God of Ede 3,000 years ago, and is now propping up the Architects’ plan to convert all matter in the universe, transforming it into new earths and populating them with redesigned, perfected humans. It transpires that not even the Silicon God is free from the human condition, hating the humans for creating him in the first place, destined to live a life in perpetual agony. The Silicon God’s scheme, known as the Program of Totality, is thus a variation of Hanuman’s efforts to rid humanity of the the human condition, a flesh-version of pure bliss. When Danlo discovers the defeated God of Ede, now confined to a small computer, a similar picture is revealed. Ede has had enough of technological transcendence, the artificiality of life, and only wants to return to his human form. The all-too-human nature of machine-god wars are mirrored in the all-too-human religious wars, past and present. On his journey through the Architects’ worlds Danlo learns that Narain heretics broke away from the Tannahill Architects to set up their own ‘true’ version of Edeism, the main point of contention being whether man should be allowed to strive for godhood. And this is after a previous schism – culminating in the War of the Faces – had forced a faction of Tannahill Architects to flee into the remote region of the Vild.
All the while, Danlo’s struggle to embrace the human condition is tested to the extreme. The Solid State Entity, a nebulae of moon-sized machine gods, now at war with the Silicon God and thus sympathetic to Danlo’s cause, transports Danlo to a replica of Old Earth and disguises herself as a replica of Danlo’s girlfriend, Tamara who had her mind cleansed of any memory of Danlo in The Broken God (1993). Like the God of Ede, the Solid State Entity has its feeble beginnings in the brain upload of just one human being, Kalinda, but now, more than 3,000 years later, it spans a whole nebulae, more than 100 light years across. Like Ede, the Solid State Entity also struggles with technological transcendence and has created Tamara as much to experience Danlo’s love. Danlo struggles with the artificiality of the Tamara construct, however real she might appear, and while he is tempted to reunite with his lost love, he ultimately ends up reconfirming his belief in embracing the human condition, in what is essentially an internalisation of Friederich Nietzsche’s concept of self-overcoming:
“No one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life, no one but you yourself alone.”
Friederich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditation (1873)
At the end of the day, Danlo stands firm and refuses the computer-aided transcendental short cuts on offer, whether it is Hanuman’s attempt to create a simulated meta-life of pure bliss or any of the escapist religions proffered by cybernetic churches. He does not believe in quickening or vastening – he believes in deepening only.
May 20, 2024
In a galaxy seemingly gull of gods and those who would become gods, Danlo the Wild seeks to become fully human. In this, the second book of the A Requiem For Homo-Sapiens trilogy, Danlo -possibly the most deeply likeable character I've ever encountered in a book- leaves behind the planet of his birth and of his wonderful -and terrible- education, and falls across the stars in the hope of finding a cure for a manufactured plague on the brink of wiping out a race of retro-engineered neanderthals - his own blessed people. He encounters gods with ganglia spread across light-years - mad gods, warring gods, dead gods. The greatest of all Warrior Poets. His resurrected love. A tiger burning as bright as only tigers can. Composite minds. An unutterably vast, but decaying religion destroying stars. The recorded dead (who, of course, know that it is better to be alive). And in one marvellous scene he watches the workings of his own brain in real-time, and dives willingly, wildly, into the firestorm feedback such an action creates.
As with all this series (and its precursor, Neverness), philosophy is the major object, and Zindell explores it thoroughly. There are admittedly longueurs (he is not at all adverse to paragraphs that run for multiple pages), and he can sometimes be guilty of labouring a point - but such things are readily forgiven because, overall, these are books full of wonder and colour and insight.
And, yes, I rather adore them.
As with all this series (and its precursor, Neverness), philosophy is the major object, and Zindell explores it thoroughly. There are admittedly longueurs (he is not at all adverse to paragraphs that run for multiple pages), and he can sometimes be guilty of labouring a point - but such things are readily forgiven because, overall, these are books full of wonder and colour and insight.
And, yes, I rather adore them.
Read
November 9, 2021I find this series so fascinating and compelling that I absolutely recommend it; that said, I feel like this one—published in the 90s, so no commentary intended the way it might be now re: transness, disability—has a distaste for computer augmentation of the body/brain that kind of rubs me the wrong way. Honestly I think if I met Danlo he would be a TERF.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews