The Seventh Age

Book excerpt: Winning the ultimate battle of survival does not require staying alive… The planet awakes, unleashing a hidden fury. Caught at the epicenter of the first earthquake in centuries, Dabaz Huavossa soon finds it was only the harbinger of a vast misery to follow. And though his utopian world is suddenly disintegrating around him, Dabaz craves more than mere survival. Unwittingly binding himself to an unexpected mentor—the highest leader of his land, a member of the strange race of people called the Immortals— Dabaz is forced to confront life’s deepest questions, while increasingly mistrusting this one who claims to hold the answers. Dabaz fights a growing dread: all life is pointless when trapped in a rush to the grave. His scrabbling for a life worth living pits him against all he holds dear and blinds him to the fact that he is equipping his increasingly savage society for the ultimate battle—the battle with no neutral ground—the battle in which choosing whom to trust is choosing whether to live or die—the battle that determines not just Dabaz’s fate, but the ultimate fate of mankind. A story that defies easy categorization, The Seventh Age deftly combines many subsets of speculative fiction: it is a scientific/metaphysical, utopian/dystopian, mythical/historical, distorted hero’s journey interwoven with philosophical rumination. The reader will be engrossed, will certainly be called upon to think, and will perhaps come away profoundly changed.