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The Politics of Fear
Hardcover
Series: The Compact Cycle, Book 1
ISBN13: 9781968122089
Publisher: High Trestle Press
Published: Jul 7 2026
Pages: 648
Weight: 2.23
Height: 1.38 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Nothing strains the bonds of an alliance quite like peace and prosperity.
The Defensive Compact was a fine idea at its inception-a supranational governing body created by treaty between 237 interplanetary civilizations. And all it took to bring the squabbling, self-interested, xenophobic parties to terms was a shared existential threat.
That threat arrived in the form of the Dorylus Encephalon, a collective organism driven by its biological imperative to incorporate or eradicate every extrinsic genetic line it encounters. Thanks to the alliance, Compact forces managed to battle the Enceph to a stalemate. The resulting cease-fire shields Compact worlds from further Enceph incursion-as long as everyone abides by its terms.
One-thousand years into the cessation of hostilities, those same Compact worlds have become hopelessly entangled in a corrupt web of economic, military, and cultural ties. The Compact Assembly is the bloated bureaucratic organ responsible for its administration. Mats Hyyland enjoys a permanent political appointment to the Assembly as Eminent Voice of the Human Diaspora-permanent being the operative word. In a vain attempt to cling to power, he achieves virtual immortality by cycling his consciousness through a series of increasingly volatile clones. When the Assembly is rocked by a high-profile political assassination, Hyyland's investigation leads him to uncover a conspiracy that threatens the very cease-fire holding the Enceph at bay. Hyyland's race to prevent that dire outcome sets him at odds with his fellow corrupt politicians, amoral corporate plutocrats, a parasitic priesthood, flamboyant pirates, self-righteous academics, an oversexed cartel queenpin, a dying bounty hunter, and a kleptosexual prostitute with a remarkable anatomic quirk.
Politics, in other words.
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