About The Ido Chronicles
The Ido Chronicles is a work of science fiction, currently under development by Geoffreyjen Edwards. It recounts the story of the last major crisis in the development of humanity before our ability to understand history is lost, as the complexity of change defies understanding.
The action takes place thousands of years in our future, at a time when humanity has populated billions of planets or other habitats within a small part of the Milky Way galaxy (a region called the Humanitat). The story is grounded, however, in the idea that humans develop biotech and nanotech into a set of modular cocktails that update, enrich and enable human biological functioning in environments much more extreme than is common today. For example, the most popular habitats are so-called "spindle cities" that float in the atmospheres of gas giants, planets like Jupiter or Saturn in our solar system. The ubiquitous availability to these technologies radically altered our economic environment, and following a chaotic period of reorganization, human civilization was driven forward by a pan-galactic collective infrastructure, part game, part oracle, and part government, called the Ido. Furthermore, in the early days of expansion into the solar system, a technology was developed that could be used to slow the flow of time across a bounded region of space. The tempo field enables people to travel to the stars within a lifetime - in this universe, all interstellar transports operate at speeds less than the speed of light. No warp drive!
Within this restructured future civilization, five factions, each representing a different vision of the way forward, emerged. These are : UmaFax, which views human development as essentially creative ; EngFax, those who consider technology to be the key to our future ; EcoFax, which sees human develop in ecosystem terms ; DeoFax, focused on theological perspectives ; and IdoFax, which situates human evolution in terms of paradox.
The Ido Chronicles is an extensive series of science fiction novels conceived to be a single piece of work. The story has been subdivided into 15 novels, organized into five trilogies. I call the whole collection a “braided quintet”, since each trilogy tells one thread of the same story, and it is the braided collection that provides the full story. The five trilogies follow the lives of five key players, one from each faction, as they intersect and interact. The Crucium Crisis, also called the Sodenheim Crisis, concerns the events that lead up to a major cataclysm in the unfolding story of humanity, as huge star-spanning technologies run amok, and explores the consequences down through the centuries and millennia that follow the crisis.
Furthermore, in addition to the main story set out in The Ido Chronicles, a number of additional novels have been written as well as extensive additional notes. The Ido Compendium is a series of volumes with broader scope, providing details of technology, habitats, flora and fauna, alien species, history, linguistics, sociology, economics, and so on.
This is science fiction in the grand tradition of writers such as Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Olaf Stapledon, a vast future history.
The books are in the process of being edited and published by Untimely Books (the book publishing arm of Metapsychosis). The first of the 15 book cycle, Plenum : The First Book of Deo, will appear in May 2022.