Radiant (novel)

Radiant is a science fiction novel by the Canadian author James Alan Gardner. It was published in 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers under their Eos Books imprint. It is the seventh novel in Gardner's "League of Peoples" series. Like the six preceding novels, Radiant is set in the middle of the 25th century; like most of them, it takes place in outer space and on alien planets, and features the continuing character Festina Ramos.

In keeping with the series as a whole, Radiant shares the same backstory and conceptual background as the earlier books. Humanity has moved into the galaxy: based on a terraformed and bio-engineered New Earth, a human society called the Technocracy has developed an advanced, multi-planet, space-travelling society. The Technocracy explores space and colonizes new planets through its navy-like Outward Fleet and its Explorer Corps. Youn Suu, the novel's protagonist and first-person narrator, is a member of that Corps, as are the majority of the protagonists in Gardner's series. The Technocracy exists under the aegis of the League of Peoples, an umbrella organization of highly advanced alien beings that enforces a galactic peace and controls fatal violence against sentient beings in interstellar space.

In Radiant, Gardner develops hints in the earlier books of a more complex picture of the human future. Specifically, he delineates an offshoot of Technocracy society that calls itself Unity. In the Technocracy, genetic modification of human beings is severely limited (though the limits are regularly violated on an individual and black market basis), while the Unity has embraced genetic modification as their way of life. The novel also employs alien species introduced in prior books: the Cashlings (from Ascending), the Greenstriders (from Expendable and Vigilant), the Fuentes (from Ascending), and most notably, from Hunted, the form of sentient red moss nicknamed "the Balrog" (an obvious and Gardner-acknowledged borrowing from J. R. R. Tolkien). In Hunted, a supporting character is infected with the red moss in a symbiotic relationship; in that novel, Festina Ramos describes the moss as "Grossly intelligent...marginally telepathic and telekinetic...possibly precognitive..." (Hunted, chapter 16; ellipses in the original). Experience shows that the moss is far more powerful and formidable than Festina then guessed (scratch the "marginally" and "possibly"). In Radiant, the protagonist Youn Suu is infested with the Balrog, with extreme consequences.