Into its maze of colour-coded streets of ice a wild boy stumbles, starving, frostbitten and grieving, a spear in his hand: Danlo the Wild, a messenger from the deep past of man. Brought up from Neverness by the Alaloi people, Neanderthal cave-dwellers, Danlo alone of his tribe has survived a plague – because he is not, as he thought, a misshaped Neanderthal, but human with immunity engineered into his genes. He learns that the disease was created by the sinister Architects of the Universal Cybernetic Church. The Architects possess a cure which can save other Alaloi tribes. But the Architects have migrated to the region of space known as the Vild, and there they are killing stars.
All of civilisation has converged on Neverness through the manifold of space travel. Beyond science, beyond decadence, sects and disciplines multiply there. Danlo, his mind shaped by the primitive man, brings to Neverness a single long-lost memory that will change them all.
After studying philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, and physics, David Zindell moved to the Rocky Mountains to devote himself to skiing, rock climbing, and writing. Writing won out and became the passion of his life. His story ‘Shanidar’ won the Writers of the Future contest, and he was nominated for a Hugo award for best new writer of the year. His internationally bestselling novel Neverness was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clark Award. His successive works include the Requiem For Homo Sapiens trilogy and epic Grail quest, The Ea Cycle. His most recent novels were The Idiot Gods, which tells of the orca Arjuna’s quest to speak to the human race about the future of life on earth, and The Remembrancer's Tale, a return to the Neverness universe.