Messioph: The First Book of Ido

By Geoffreyjen Edwards

From the series The Ido Chronicles

Fiction  •  Science Fiction

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About the Book

Grolier Desius grew up in a space-faring clan (or grat) with a grandiose mission, engineering star fields to be part of a galaxy-sized computing network. But his life takes a wrenching turn when he and his brother return from a worksite to find his family wiped out and their holding destroyed.

An ill-prepared Grolier must take leadership of the Desius clan survivors, and balance the call of vengeance with the fight to save what’s left. Working to distinguish unknown enemies and allies among the other engineering clans, and uncovering histories of political intrigue and malice, he is brought face to face with an ugly secret at the heart of his own family.

Though his investigations lead Grolier on an inward journey into unhealed traumas and abuse, ultimately the fate of his clan, and the whole star-engineering community, will depend on a group of outsiders: the enigmatic jonahs, sentient organic ships descended from the whales of Old Earth.

Author Geoffreyjen Edwards offers another novel about big ideas and fatal consequences in the same universe as Plenum: the First Book of Deo.

concept art by the author

About The Ido Chronicles

The Ido Chronicles recounts the story of the last major crisis in the development of humanity before our ability to understand history is lost, as the complexity of change defies understanding.

The action takes place thousands of years in our future, at a time when humanity has expanded into a significant part of the galaxy. The story is grounded, however, in the idea that humans develop biotech and nanotech into a set of modular cocktails that update, enrich and enable human biological functioning in environments much more extreme than is common today. The ubiquitous availability to these technologies radically alters our current economic environment, and following a chaotic period of reorganization, human civilization is driven forward by a pan-galactic collective infrastructure that is part game, part oracle, part government, called the Ido. Furthermore, in the early days of expansion into the solar system, a technology is developed that can be used to slow the flow of time across a bounded region of space. The tempo field enables people to travel to the stars within a lifetime—in this universe, all interstellar transports operate at speeds less than the speed of light. No warp drive!

Within this restructured future civilization, five factions, each representing a different vision of the way forward, emerge. These are: UmaFax, which views human development as essentially creative; EngFax, those who consider technology to be the key to our future; EcoFax, which sees human development in ecosystem terms; DeoFax, focused on theological perspectives; and IdoFax, which situates human evolution in terms of paradox.

The Ido Chronicles is an extensive series of science fiction novels conceived to be a single piece of work. The story has been subdivided into 15 novels, organized into five trilogies (I call the whole collection a “braided quintet,” since each trilogy tells one thread of the same story, and it is the braided collection that provides the full story). The five trilogies follow the lives of five key players, one from each faction, as they intersect and interact. The Crucium Crisis, also called the Sodenheim Crisis, concerns the events that lead up to a major cataclysm in the unfolding story of humanity, as huge star-spanning technologies run amok, and explores the consequences down through the centuries and millennia that follow the crisis.

This is science fiction in the grand tradition of writers such as Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Olaf Stapledon, a vast future history.

About the Author

Geoffreyjen Edwards

Before becoming a science-fiction writer, Geoffreyjen Edwards led a successful career as a full-time scientist. Indeed, he populates his world-building by drawing on experience in fields as diverse as astrophysics, artificial intelligence, geomatics, design, disability studies and the performing arts. Plenum: The First Book of Deo is his first published novel. Dr. Edwards lives and works in Quebec City, Canada, and has published smaller pieces in both English and French. He also is a fashion designer. Look him up at www.geoffreyjenedwards.com.

Events, Interviews, and Media Coverage

  • An Evening of Poetry, Memoir, and Sci-Fi, this was a Cosmos / Metapsychosis / Untimely Books event. Visiting from Quebec, Canada (on their way to the Nebula Awards), Geoffreyjen Edwards read selections from their novels Plenum: The First Book of Deo and Messioph: The First Book of Ido—the first two installments of their fifteen-volume Ido Chronicles series, set thousands of years in humanity’s future. Colorado-based authors Heather Fester and Marco V Morelli read new work from their forthcoming releases, Discarded Maps (memoir) and I AM THE SINGULARITY (poetry).