The Politics of Fear (The Compact Cycle)

Nothing strains the bonds of an alliance quite like peace and prosperity.

The Defensive Compact was a fine idea at its inception-a supranational governing body created by treaty between 237 interplanetary civilizations. And all it took to bring the squabbling, self-interested, xenophobic parties to terms was a shared existential threat.

That threat arrived in the form of the Dorylus Encephalon, a collective organism driven by its biological imperative to incorporate or eradicate every extrinsic genetic line it encounters. Thanks to the alliance, Compact forces managed to battle the Enceph to a stalemate. The resulting cease-fire shields Compact worlds from further Enceph incursion-as long as everyone abides by its terms.

One-thousand years into the cessation of hostilities, those same Compact worlds have become hopelessly entangled in a corrupt web of economic, military, and cultural ties. The Compact Assembly is the bloated bureaucratic organ responsible for its administration. Mats Hyyland enjoys a permanent political appointment to the Assembly as Eminent Voice of the Human Diaspora-permanent being the operative word. In a vain attempt to cling to power, he achieves virtual immortality by cycling his consciousness through a series of increasingly volatile clones. When the Assembly is rocked by a high-profile political assassination, Hyyland's investigation leads him to uncover a conspiracy that threatens the very cease-fire holding the Enceph at bay. Hyyland's race to prevent that dire outcome sets him at odds with his fellow corrupt politicians, amoral corporate plutocrats, a parasitic priesthood, flamboyant pirates, self-righteous academics, an oversexed cartel queenpin, a dying bounty hunter, and a kleptosexual prostitute with a remarkable anatomic quirk.

Politics, in other words.

Z. Bennett Lorimer is the author of several SFF series and short stories including the Tales of Ciel, The Divine Heretic, the Compact Cycle, and Shattered, and a recipient of the 2019 Iowa Home Voices Award for his short story "American Drone Pilot," first published in The Superstition Review. He is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop at UC-San Diego. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Iowa State University and is the former managing editor of the international literary journal Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. In 2025, he launched High Trestle Press LLC, an independent press dedicated to publishing series science fiction and fantasy on an expedited timeline.A Long Island native, he currently lives in Ames, IA, with his partner and children.