ohn Drinan is returning to Earth after a successful stint training robotic asteroid miners when his ship is disabled and crash-lands. He soon discovers that the Earth he has reached is in an alternate dimension in which he was killed as a child. To survive, he finds employment as a biotech research subject.
The world of 2033 in which he is stranded soon takes a strange turn. People of all types begin to develop a psychotic disorder that begins with rhythmic obsession—drumming and dancing—and the disorder soon progresses to stranger phases of out-of-body spirit traveling and shape-shifting into animal forms. Cameron Spires, a rich and powerful biotech mogul, seeing the end of human civilization, arranges for a large group of scientists, and others who have not contracted the plague, to be transported to the Bahamas, where they survive while most of the rest of the world descends into apocalyptic chaos.
Thirty years later, the only humans who have survived outside Spires' Bahamian sanctuary are a scattering of normal people and shape-shifting werfolk with supernatural mental abilities, most living a nomadic existence. Spires, who has developed an immortality treatment he shares only with his people on the island, and has developed aquatic merfolk to guard it, has been ruling his island sanctuary with an iron hand, banishing any who defy him. When he banishes his top scientist, and then his daughter Trillia's illicit lover, she escapes to find her banished friends.
The escapees travel up the inland waterway of the United States' eastern coast from Florida to New York City in a quest to find out what caused the plague. In the end, they not only find the complex cause of the end of human civilization, but also discover how to take mankind to a new level of existence and find transcendence.
Ambitious and imaginative
Empty Cities of the Full Moon is an ambitious and imaginative novel that successfully mixes the disparate elements of New Age mythology and hard science. Hendrix tells his story in chapters alternating between the plague year, 2033, and the quest to discover its cause in 2066, a difficult technique that he executes almost flawlessly, each era providing clues that build toward a denouement of revelatory transcendence.
Cameron Spires is the consummate SF villain, a brilliant scientist who decides to usurp human destiny. The other protagonists are an interestingly diverse group that includes other (less amoral) scientists, an intellectual whose avocation before the plague was shamanic "drumming, dancing, dreaming and drugging," a nun who worked in a hospital, a former security expert and assorted werfolk and merfolk.
The most compelling part of the novel is the quest up the East Coast: Various parties involved visit a decaying Cape Canaveral, where John and a group of friends are trying to repair a rocket; a family of humans ("trufolk") raising their children in a lonely but pastoral existence; a village of werfolk; a militant group in D.C. dedicated to destroying all werfolk; a group of nuns in Baltimore who help werfolk die and transcend; and the abandoned Manhattan, where they find the final clues to what caused the plague, as well as the true nature of the universe and sentience.
Hendrix uses all the tools in his science-fiction tool bag in coming up with a rational explanation for the plague, and what must be done about it, utilizing biotech, nanotech, quantum theory, many-universe cosmology and more to explain the shamanic myths of human history and prehistory. It is an amazing tour de force marred only slightly by stretching just a little too hard for profundity. Empty Cities of the Full Moon is one of the best SF novels of the year and a certain award contender.
