An interesting YA read, which centres around the question of free will and whether or not it is better to have responsibility for your own actions and end in disaster, or be sheltered from them but be stultified and robbed of creativity and a spiritual dimension to life.

Christopher is flying to Greece to take on a menial job as an escape from the life mapped out for him - University, a money earning high flying job - which he dreads, when the plane explodes and he is the sole survivor. He finds himself in the castle of Ben-Harran, one of the Galactic Controllers who are meant to be responsible for all intelligent life forms within his particular domain, which turns out to be the galaxy in which Earth is situated. However, unlike his fellow Controllers, Ben-Harran believes that such life forms must be able to evolve and learn from their mistakes rather than having satellites positioned around their worlds beaming controlling rays at them which prevent aggression but which don't allow the inhabitants to develop self control.

Ben-Harran has brought Christopher, and representatives of two other planets - Mahri, a barbarian queen, savage and tyrannical to her former people, and Kysha, a young woman from one of the planets which are controlled - to his domain, a 'castle' which is created by a form of psychic technology. Kysha has been used to learning everything by rote, including the Life Laws, rules that prevent killing of life forms and meat eating, and has severe problems adapting when she suddenly experiences negative emotions which she has never had to learn to control. Christopher meanwhile struggles to understand whether Ben-Harran is a monster or a good man. One of the planets in the Milky Way galaxy has recently been destroyed by nuclear war, which Ben-Harran could have prevented if he had been willing to suppress the aggression of its people as the rest of his colleagues are doing in their own galaxies. Now he is being summoned to the alternative dimension called Atui where his colleagues rule, to face trial and banishment to a remote world. His only possible defenders are the three people he has kidnapped and who have had to wrestle with the issue of free will for themselves.

The rulers in Atui have, in effect, appropriated the role of God and robbed their subjects of faith, as the same rays they use to keep aggression from appearing also rob people of imaginative abilities and spiritual yearnings. The central question of the novel is whether it is better to live in the safety of a predictable existence which lacks religious belief, or any true art or music, or to have the possibility of creative and spiritual evolution and fulfilment in a world where war, famine and other attrocities are permitted to exist. ( )