It’s 2526, and there’s a religious war raging across the worlds of human space. It’s messiah is Adam. Initially, he announces his presence with a quote from the Book of Revelations and by sounding like Lucifer in the Garden of Eden:

"I am Adam. I am the Alpha, the first in the new epoch of your evolution. I will hand you the universe. Follow me and you will become as gods."

But Adam is no man despite the form he cloaks himself in. He is an insane alien AI, the last of the machines built by the alien Race to manipulate human affairs. But his builders destroyed themselves after humanity confined to them to their home planet in the Genocide War. Seeing the ruins of the Race, Adam became obsessed with eliminating “stasis, entropy, and death”. Armed with powerful nanotechnology, he took apart a sun and the colony world of Xi Virgis orbiting it.

That act was a deliberate provocation, the inititiation of Adam’s elaborate plan of sabotage, suborned agents in various governments, using an ancient wormhole network to launch surprise attacks with his nanotech cloud, and setting the worlds of the Caliphate and Roman Catholic Church against each other. But, first up, he kills Mosasa, the other remaining AI of the race and leader of an expedition to investigate the mystery of Xi Virgis disappearing that was the center of the preceding novel in the trilogy, Prophets.

Above the nearest human settlement to Xi Virgis, Salmagundi, Adam makes his announcement. Join him or become dust. And then the black rain falls, altering and absorbing people and buildings. Those who accept Adam’s offer have their bodies, souls, minds, and personalities, absorbed into his cloud.

But there are other competing religious visions to Adam’s and not just the Caliphate and Catholic Church. There is the faith of the St. Rajasthan of the Fifteen Worlds settled by moreaus (animals altered to become intelligent warriors) and franks (genetically altered humans), both products of 21st science. It holds humanity is Fallen, damned by God for its presumptions, at one time, of creating the heretical technologies of nanotech, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence. There is the Proteus Commune, the benign equivalent of Adam, which offers its own version of immortality to absorbed minds – but only those who volunteer. And there is the curious Hall of Minds native to Salmagundi. It records the personalities and memories of the Salmagundians and uploads them into future colony members.

On Salmagundi, a Protean egg, one of many copies of its archive of minds, lands, its records damaged by an attack by Adam. Knowing humanity’s hatred of nanotechnology, a member of the governing Grand Triad, Alexander Shane, fears the Protean presence will bring unwanted attention from other human worlds. Besides muted personalities, the effect of Salmagundians having so memories and personalities in their head is a certain indecisiveness. Shane takes over the government in a coup perhaps inspired by the mutinous marine Kathy Shane, one of the founders of the colony almost 200 hundred years ago and a major character in Swann’s Hostile Takeover trilogy. He has access to her memories. When the survivors of Mosasa’s expedition, their ship shot up by the advanced Caliphate fleet Adam lured to Xi Virgis, fall into his hands, he “mind rapes” them, a coercive uploading of their memories and personalities.

Also landing in lifeboats on Salmagundi are Kurata and Nickolai, mercs hired by Mosasa, a frank and moreau respectively. Nickolai, suborned by an agent of Mosasa, has disgraced himself by sabotaging Moasa’s ship, and he’ll find that Adam has implanted dangerous compulsions in him.

And then there’s Parvi, a Hindu and leader of Mosasa’s mercs who finds herself throwing in with Moslems who won’t accept Adam’s offer and who want to make a desperate attempt to get to Salmagundi.

But not every member of Mosasa’s crew rejects Adam. Data analyst Rebecca Tsoravitch accepts and her trained mind begins to see Adam’s limitations. She and Nickolai are types that often show up in Swann’s fiction: those who come to reject the morality of an institution they’ve aligned themselves with.

In orbit around the planet Styx, Lieutenant Toni Valentine is startled when her “ghost”, a duplicate produced by going through a wormhole in the wrong direction, shows up to warn her of Adam’s future onslaught against the planet.

And at the heart of the Caliphate and in Earth’s system, Adam arrives to deliver his ultimatum.

Besides Mosasa, the manipulator behind the events of the Hostile Takeover books, we have other characters from them showing up in very altered form.

Adam has his vulnerabilities but are they enough? The damaged Proteus archive on Salmagundi suggests the answer lies with some alien ruins on the planet at the heart of so much in Swann’s Terran Confederation series: the anarchy of Bakunin.

Swann’s space opera is superb and has got everything: superscience, sabotage, espionage, piracy, firefights, space battles, planetary destruction, a story where the impulses of religion still very much shape human society, and that ponders questions of identity, the “soul” if you will.

There’s a lot of moving parts in this trilogy, and Swann’s narrative gears mesh cleanly to deliver a fast and powerful narrative. ( )

I like action. I like suspense. I like drama. And increasingly, I like S. Andrew Swann. He knows how to write all of these into his plot, and he does it deftly, smoothly, and never lets the writing get in the way of the story.

Heretics is the second book of Swann’s Apotheosis trilogy (apotheosis means “the exultation of a subject to divine level”). While facing the risk of succumbing to “middle book syndrome,” Swann manages to keep the action on the edge, heighten the danger, and pull out an ending that, while appropriately leaving the situation more grave than at the beginning and tee-ing off the starting point for book three (the appropriately named Messiah), still follows a story arc that makes the read a satisfactory experience.

Nevertheless, Heretics still is a middle book, and at the end, its main function is to move the plot to the dénouement, and it just barely stays away from middle book syndrome. We are introduced to a few new characters, learn more about our antagonist Adam, and watch the known universe crumble before his claim as the one true god. Adam, the nanobot entity possessed of a more than slightly insane artificial intelligence, has assumed divine status. He begins each planetary invasion with a perfunctory demand of its inhabitants that they worship him by joining in his restructuring of the universe on a molecular level. “Live forever,” he promises, “or be destroyed.” Using technological powers that mankind universally considers “heretical,” he swoops through the universe remaking worlds in his own image, an image that is composed of entirely nanobots and networked artificial intelligence. It is Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, and Michael Crichton’s Prey all in one, and on a scale spanning many galaxies. It is horrifying, a destruction by our own creation, and Swann pulls no punches.

Adam never develops far beyond the villain and with good reason. He’s just the bad guy, and we readily accept that he is arrogant, evil, and non-human. The people we care about—our heroes—are who we begin to see grow and develop in the furnace of their fight for survival. In Heretics, Swann shows his characters begin to step out of themselves, grow, and connect with each other. That said, it is important to note, that Swann writes with more focus on action and plot than on internal character development. Even as the characters grow, brood, agonize, and struggle, the struggle is more against the larger than life threat to humanity, the caricatured Adam, not the inner man’s transcendence of himself. Rather, their transcendence emerges as self sacrifice for the greater good of human survival, not unlike Joseph Cambell’s “Hero of a Thousand Faces.” We don’t get too close to them—just close enough to care, to see what we expect of a hero, and then it’s back to the action. And you know what? It works great. It’s space opera, and it’s exactly what I expected when I picked up the novel.

With a villain everyone can hate and fear, heroes that everyone can empathize with, and a dire situation that pits both heroes and villains in a “Hail Mary” fight to the death, I enjoyed flipping the pages of Swann’s novel. I finished the last page of Heretics, set it down, and immediately picked up Messiah (book three, which came out just this year) and started reading. I had no desire to put off the conclusion to the Apotheosis, and I look forward to seeing the finish of the story.

A cautionary comment on content: One scene in the book bothered me. At one point, the mutant tiger begins a relationship with one of the humans (also mutated, but not quite like him) characters. While there is only brief description, there is foreplay and reference to a sexual relationship. This is science-fiction, and perhaps interspecies romance has a place there, but it was the sexual description that was a bridge too far for me. I just didn’t buy the interspecies love affair thing. Fortunately, the scene is brief, short, and not reoccurring.
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