I play with a number of incidental concepts here. There are literary and poetic allusions galore woven into the fabric of the text; at one point some readers were contesting with each other to see who could find the most. One, from William Butler Yeats, I used again decades later, in DoOon Mode. Another is the Oedipus theme, the Greek tragedy of the man who inadvertently murdered his father and married his mother. Thus Aton’s search for the Minionette takes him to the section of the Earth library relating to Oedipus, which Partner says with disgust has no relevance. Little did he know. Malice set herself up on a ship named Jocasta—Oedipus’s mother. The entire lifestyle of the Minionettes was not merely pleasure from pain, but incestuous, as they married their mean spirited sons, grandsons, and so on down the line. Aton had to catch on to that, and be revolted, before he could properly address Malice, bringing her pleasure. Yes, he did have sex with his mother; his walk on the surface of the spotel suggested a landscape shaped like a woman’s body, and it really was her flesh he addressed rather than the landscape, and when he entered the spotel aperture, there at the secret lake, it was between her legs. His mind pretended it was otherwise, but he knew as he thought in evasive poetic metric feet, and suffered for it, and that gave Malice much pleasure, which he telepathically, perversely, shared. “O Joy!” as he so guiltily climaxed. The likely problems of getting this into print required me to mask it so that the editor would not catch on. When Aton finally came to terms with it, and loved her without hating it, she died: his “pure” kiss killed her instantly. Elsewhere, there is the facetious history of the § space drive discovery, which enabled mankind to colonize the galaxy. The discussion of the pattern of the Chill is a parody of the wave vs. particle theories of the nature of light; folk today may not realize how big that debate loomed before compromise was reached. Light is both.

But the main thing is the parallelism. In retrospect I think I labored too much on this and not enough on nuances of style. For once thing, I’m not sure I like the way I experimented with Aton’s first-person thoughts; I don’t believe I used that device again in the following hundred novels. But the novel is as it is, and I stand by it.

The Prolog is the chthonic entity speaking in free verse, establishing that life is expanding like a nova, mentioning the § dating system—from the onset of faster-than-light travel (that’s why I call this novel science fantasy: sounds like science, but is fantasy), and introduces the protagonist Aton Five. That sets the scene.