The Ascension Factor
About this audiobook
Set twenty-five years after The Lazarus Effect, this final book in the Destination: Void collaboration between Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom concludes the story of the planet Pandora.
Pandora's humans have been recovering land from its raging seas at an accelerated pace since The Lazarus Effect. The great kelp of the seas, sentient but electronically manipulated by humans, buffers Pandora's wild currents to restore land and facilitate the booming sea trade. New settlements rise overnight, but children starve in their shadows. An orbiting assembly station is near completion of Project Voidship, which is the hope of many for finding a better world.
Pandora is under the fist of an ambitious clone from hibernation called the Director, who rules with a sadistic security force led by the assassin Spider Nevi. Small resistance groups have had little effect on his absolute power. The Director controls the transportation of foodstuffs; uprisings are punished with starvation.
The resistance fighters' main hope is Crista Galli, a woman believed by some to be the child of God. Crista pools her talents with Dwarf MacIntosh, Beatriz Tatoosh, and Rico LaPush to transcend the barriers between the different species and overthrow the Director and the sinister cabal with which he rules.
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About the author
Frank Herbert (1920–1986), winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards and a #1 New York Times bestselling author, was born in Tacoma, Washington, and worked as a reporter and later as an editor for a number of West Coast newspapers before becoming a full-time writer. His first science fiction story was published in 1952, but he achieved fame more than ten years later with the publication of “Dune World” and “The Prophet of Dune” in Analog. The stories were amalgamated in the bestselling novel Dune in 1965.
Bill Ransom was born in Puyallup, Washington, in 1945 and began full-time employment at the age of eleven as an agricultural worker. He has since earned two college degrees and has held a variety of jobs, including as a firefighter and a CPR instructor. He began a pilot project with the Poetry in the Schools program in Washington State and founded and directed the popular Port Townsend Writers Conference for Centrum. His poetry has been nominated for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
Scott Brick first began narrating audiobooks in 2000, and after recording almost 400 titles in five years, AudioFile magazine named Brick a Golden Voice and “one of the fastest-rising stars in the audiobook galaxy.” He has read a number of titles in Frank Herbert’s bestselling Dune series, and he won the 2003 Science Fiction Audie Award for Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. Brick has narrated for many popular authors, including Michael Pollan, Joseph Finder, Tom Clancy, and Ayn Rand. He has also won over 40 AudioFile Earphones Awards and the AudioFile award for Best Voice in Mystery and Suspense 2011. In 2007, Brick was named Publishers Weekly’s Narrator of the Year. Brick has performed on film, television and radio. He appeared on stage throughout the United States in productions of Cyrano, Hamlet, Macbeth and other plays. In addition to his acting work, Brick choreographs fight sequences, and was a combatant in films including Romeo and Juliet, The Fantasticks and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. He has also been hired by Morgan Freeman to write the screenplay adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.
