The Merchants of Souls
Encyclopedia
The Merchants of Souls is a science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

, the third book of the Thousand Cultures series, by John Barnes
John Barnes (author)
-Writing:Two of his novels, The Sky So Big and Black and The Duke of Uranium have been reviewed as having content appropriate for a young adult readership, comparing favorably to Robert A. Heinlein's "juvenile" novels...

 whose story is told from the perspective of a middle-aged special agent named Giraut. The Merchants of Souls examines consumerism
Consumerism
Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods and services in ever greater amounts. The term is often associated with criticisms of consumption starting with Thorstein Veblen...

 when Earth
Earth
Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

 demands access to other peoples psypyxes, which are personality/memory recordings used solely as a backup in case of death. The decadent people of Earth want to use the psypyx personality recordings for entertainment - essentially resurrecting their experiences while denying them the quality of free will.

Characters

  • Giraut - An experienced agent and musician from Nou Occitan who was brought back from leave to address a new threat to personal liberties.
  • Raimbaut - A long-dead friend of Giraut, whose psypyx is installed in Giraut's brain as a witness against commercialization of psypyxes.
  • Laprada - A young new female OSP agent, a member of the Council of Humanity, granddaughter of a hero; love interest to Raimbaut.
  • Dji - elder OSP supervisor to Giraut, Laprada, Piranesi, and Paxa.
  • Shan - elder OSP supervisor and friend to Giraut, Margaret, Qrala, Paxa, Piranesi, and other OSP agents.
  • Piranesi & Paxa - Military husband and artistic wife; both are OSP agents from Hedon, the so-called "Pleasure Culture".
  • Margaret - Giraut's ex-wife from Caledony, the culture where they met and fell in love, and then both chose to join the OSP.
  • Qrala - an elder experienced OSP agent; a contemporary of Shan and Dji.

Planets referenced

  • Earth—the home planet of Humanity in the Inner Sphere; the Sol System with its local colonized planets and their satellites, both natural and artificial; also the colonies of Alpha Centauri and other neighboring star systems.
  • Hedon (pleasure planet, where Giraut goes on vacation).
  • Caledony (Margaret's home planet; one other culture called St. Michael's shares the planet peacefully).
  • Nou Occitan (Giraut's home planet) - one of the few colony planets that had no other human culture seeded because of its unusual orbit around Arcturus, and its scarcity of land (according to the rules of the Charter).
  • Briand (a high-gravity planet orbiting a bright star, where two human literary cultures were seeded, and clashed, and eventually destroyed each other); described in "Earth Made of Glass".
  • Freiporto (a criminal culture where strength was the only law, and slavery was its currency, until the evil was corrected).

See also

  • Interstellar teleporter
    Interstellar teleporter
    An interstellar teleporter is a hypothetical technology appearing in science fiction, typically in hard sci-fi, which teleports people and/or other objects over interstellar distances instantaneously...

  • Tunnel in the Sky
    Tunnel in the Sky
    Tunnel in the Sky is a science fiction book written by Robert A. Heinlein and published in 1955 by Scribner's as one of the Heinlein juveniles. The story describes a group of students sent on a survival test to an uninhabited planet...

  • Gridlinked
    Gridlinked
    Gridlinked is Neal Asher's first novel, published by the Macmillan Publishers imprint Pan Books in 2001. It contains elements of the technological inventiveness of hard science-fiction with a more contemporary political plotline...

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