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.
