Vanu Francoeur is a gender-neutral novice in the Kinship of the Suffering God, whose mandate is to seed new stars within a stellar nursery, where jonahs (living ships descended from the whales of Old Earth) roam wild. An intimate encounter with an exotic outsider stirs up a storm of conflicts within the usually quiet religious order, and triggers a spiritual awakening in Vanu that forever changes hir relationship with hir community and hir sibs. In rebellion against the Kinship’s heavy-handed sanctions, zhe hurtles towards a resolution-touched by a haunting mystery-deep within the fires of a star.

Vanu Francoeur is a novice in the Kinship of the Suffering God, a religious community whose mandate is to seed new stars within a stellar nursery. Vanu feels confused about hir neutral gender, and is also conflicted in hir relationships, especially with hir own sibs. An encounter with an exotic outsider stirs up a storm of conflicts within the usually quiet community. Vanu discovers that the authoritarian culture of the Kinship has deeply troubling flaws. In protest, zhe and hir sibs are drawn towards a dramatic resolution deep within the fires of a star, with consequences that could stretch across the decades and centuries to come.

Plenum: the First Book of Deo is the first book in The Ido Chronicles. This “braided quintet” of fifteen novels unfolds half a million years in our future, after humanity has populated billions of planets and other habitats within a region of the Milky Way called the Humanitat. With the help of biological and nanotechnology (collectively, “binach”), humans live in environments that are almost unimaginably extreme.