After its rediscovery in 1417, Lucretius’s Epicurean didactic poem De Rerum Natura threatened to supply radicals and atheists with the one weapon unbelief had lacked in the Middle Ages: good answers.

Scholars could now challenge Christian patterns of thought by employing the theory of atomistic physics, a sophisticated system that explained natural phenomena without appeal to divine participation, and argued powerfully against the immortality of the soul, the afterlife, and a creator God.

Ada Palmer explores how Renaissance readers, such as Machiavelli, Pomponio Leto, and Montaigne, actually ingested and disseminated Lucretius, and the ways in which this process of reading transformed modern thought. She uncovers humanist methods for reconciling Christian and pagan philosophy, and shows how ideas of emergent order and natural selection, so critical to our current thinking, became embedded in Europe’s intellectual landscape before the seventeenth century.

The year is 2454. Three centuries of peace and a hard-won golden age have come to an abrupt end.

The once steadfast leadership of the seven Hives is crumbling, soured by corruption and deception. Savagery and bloodlust, three-centuries suppressed, have been unleashed.

The terrible truth is that centuries of peace were bought with a trickle of secret murders. The killings were mathematically planned, meticulously organised to preserve the balance – to ensure no faction could dominate.

But now the secret is out, the balance has tipped, the Hives' utopian façade has slipped. Just days ago, humanity stood at the pinnacle of civilization. Now everyone – Hives and Hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and convicts, warriors and saints – is preparing for war.

The year is 2454.

The sun is setting on a hard-won golden age. For three centuries, humanity has enjoyed peace and prosperity fuelled by technological abundance, oracular data analytics, careful censorship... and just a little blood.

In a world dominated by seven factions, or 'Hives', the price of peace has been a few secret murders, mathematically planned to ensure political and economic balance. But now the secret is out, the balance is slipping and war beckons.

Convict Mycroft Canner knew this war was coming – he committed his terrible crimes to forestall it. Now, he has just one card left, a wild card no degree of statistical genius could have predicted: a thirteen-year-old child with the power to work miracles. Turning thought into matter, matter in life, this child has the power to save the world, or to doom it.

Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer--a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away.