Plot
Necromancer follows the fortunes of Paul Formaine, a mining engineer in the late 21st Century who endures several accidents. His quest for self discovery, and recovery from losing his arm, leads him to embrace the Chantry Guild. The Guild embraces a philosophy of destruction with the hope of making space for the rise of a new evolutionary form of humanity. The instruments in their goals are the Alternate Laws or Alternate Forces.
Formaine is led to the Chantry Guild after encountering Destruct, a book written by Walter Blunt, the Guild's leader. Formaine enlists under the mastery of Necromancer Jason Warren and the ethereal influence of musical vocalist Kantele Maki. His initial goal in joining the guild is the regeneration of his lost arm.
The story is punctuated by Formaine's epiphany moments. First, he realizes the inadequacy of psychology in his self exploration. He slowly realizes his own savant power over the Alternative Forces. He is taken aback by his growing hyper awareness of the world around him, specifically the inter-related isolation of all individuals. This isolation is dramatically symbolized by Formaine's own singularity. He has a final epiphany near the end of the book that clarifies for him his own identity and potential ... and much more.
The book is divided into three sub-books: Isolate, Set, and Pattern. In each book, Formaine realizes the function of each mathematical collective in the flow of objective history and subjective reality. As with many Science Fiction novels, the philosophical underpinnings of evolution require a decidedly unscientific leap in the reader's understanding of what constitutes science to rally the punctuation that brings about the next stage of human evolution.
Read more about this topic: Necromancer (novel)
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“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
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I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)