Latin America features ecological "islands" called "tepuis," jungle realms so isolated from their neighbors that evolution proceeds in unique ways. In one such pocket biosphere lives a tribe called the Mawari. They are possessed of a strange meteorite that fell to Earth generations ago. This worshipped object carried biological agents that infected the Mawari and gave them strange mental powers. Now, their existence made known to outsiders, the tribe will become the focus of the First World's greed. But what the Westerners don't realize is that by breaking the isolation of the Mawari they are infecting the whole world with the germs of a potential apocalypse (or salvation, if the two can even be distinguished).

Central to the fate of the Mawari are two scientists, Michael Miskulin and Susan Yamada. They are on an expedition to the region, backed by the finances of Miskulin's rich uncle, Paul Larkin. When they arrive, they find all the adult Mawaris slaughtered and only four children left in hiding. The scientists bring the orphan children back to America and the refuge of Larkin's home.

It eventuates that the slaughter was engineered by one Gen. Retticker, who is in charge of a military project to create the perfect soldier. He wants to reverse-engineer the mental powers of the Mawari for his own uses, and has his own pet scientist, Darla Pittman, in his employ. Darla doesn't know about the genocide necessary to secure her a certain meteorite sample, and she goes to work eagerly.

But Retticker's strings are being pulled in turn by a weird cabal: Doctor Vang, leader of a conspiracy to boost mankind onto a new evolutionary plateau, and his associates, evangelist George Otis and adventurer Victor Fremdkunst. This cabal plans to trigger the End Times by stoking war in the Middle East. And the last major player is Jim Brescoll, head of the NSA, who has his own designs on the Mawari survivors.

But the wild card is that the four Mawari children—Alii, Aubrey, Ebu and Ka-dalun—have plugged into the global infosphere and are about to start pulling cosmic strings of their own.

Mushroom children game with mankind

Rudy Rucker speaks of science-fictional "power chords," those fantastical tropes that are so seminal that they keep cropping up again and again in the genre. Surely, as Howard Hendrix explicitly acknowledges, the notion of stony visitors from space and their unseen or enigmatic cargoes is one such. Meteors and meteorites present a rich topic that can never go stale so long as humanity remains ignorant of what exists beyond our atmosphere. In this new novel, Hendrix masterfully incorporates perhaps every myth, historical incident, scientific fact and way-out speculation about meteorites into one vast tapestry. It's doubtful that a better or more all-encompassing novel on this power chord could be written, barring new discoveries.

Hendrix has always been known for blending rather New Age-ish mystical themes with his hardcore scientific speculations, and this current book is no exception. The actual textbook information about celestial stones and the more far-out yet informed speculations about the biological agents they might carry are married to a kind of "indigo children" myth about the next level of human development. It's generally a happy marriage, and Hendrix succeeds in convincing us that human evolution could very well have been directed all along by these "spears of god."

But my one cavil about the book is its chosen thriller mode of narration. Hendrix makes a crack about "cheap thrillers" early on in the text, yet he wants to have his cake and eat it too. The realpolitik trappings of this story—assaults on the Dome of the Rock, black-book military conspiracies, etc.—consort uneasily at times with the more lofty investigations into the future of humanity. Modeled apparently on the success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (2003) (even those stale bogeymen the Knights Templar make an appearance, as well as the Vatican), this book tries to appeal both to the great unwashed who just want geopolitical thrills and also the more scientifically literate. Hendrix's heart is really with the latter, however, which is why he should have jettisoned the thriller mode from the start. Your average Dan Brown reader is going to stop dead at sentences like this one: "All the properties of the quantum telemorphic tools we trained them on, they fully incorporated that into their neuronal space-states."

But ultimately, the Robert Anton Wilson/Terence McKenna High Weirdness of this book nudges the Robert Ludlum/Tom Clancy stuff right off the page, and that's all to the good.