Writing career
Zindell's first published story was "The Dreamer's Sleep" in Fantasy Book in 1984. His novelette "Shanidar" won the Writers of the Future contest in 1985 and gave rise to his first novel, Neverness (1988), a science fiction epic. It was followed by a sequel trilogy called A Requiem for Homo Sapiens (1992-1998). In 2023 he added a new book to the Neverness universe called The Remembrancer's Tale.
The Neverness universe has been hailed as Dune for the 1990s. [1] Human civilization has explored and settled the galaxy using ships that interface a pilot's mind to the mathematical underpinnings of the physical universe. Artificial intelligences live as super-intelligent gods running on clusters of moon-sized computer brains. Humans have modified themselves to create a tapestry of religions and philosophies that interweave with alien cultures to amplify human potential and seek transcendence. The books often employ anthropological and ecological perspectives to examine the nature of consciousness, memory and evolution.
Zindell's fantasy epic The Ea Cycle (2001-2007) examines the evolution of consciousness through the struggle between good and evil, exploring themes of empathy, morality, war and fate. The plot concerns a prince named Valashu Elahad searching for a relic called the Lightstone to stop the immortal Morjin, Lord of Lies, who seeks to create a world filled with madness.
In 2015 he published Splendor, a memoir. In 2017 he published The Idiot Gods, a novel told from the point of view of killer whales, which are sapient. It is the first of the Xanayan series, followed by If I Am God in 2024 and The Woman and the Whale in 2025.
Zindell's work has been translated into German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian and Italian.
Reception and themes
John Clute wrote that Zindell was a "romantic, ambitious, and skilled" writer. [2]
New Scientist wrote that: ‘David Zindell writes of interstellar mathematics in poetic prose that is a joy to read’ [3] and that he presents ‘A disturbing vision of the impending collapse of a transgalactic society…the ideas are hard SF with philosophical undertones, and the story is compelling. Zindell makes you think’. [4]
Zindell has described his style as an attempt to communicate the connectedness of things, the connection between mysticism and evolution, and the possibilities of life, [5] and his fiction as an attempt to heal false dichotomies such as materialism and spirituality. [6]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
