[Anonymouse]

I thought I'd comment on a series I've read a lot: E.C. Tubbs' The Dumarest Saga.

Earl Dumarest is a traveller in the far future, apparently in the last stages of a far-flung galactic empire, now decaying, with no central controlling authority. Economics are much as they are today, buying and selling - and, of course, cheating and thievery. He has one objective, and only one: to find Earth and return to it. Basically, he's homesick to a degree we can hardly comprehend - even though he left Earth as a starving kid, being pursued by a mob and having no idea then what a spaceship even was.

The problem is that human influence has spread so far and wide owing to the Erhaft Drive, providing FTL, that by the time he's travelled more towards the galactic centre, Earth has long been forgotten and is thought of by most as just a myth, like El Dorado or Eden (both believed to be worlds - there are in fact at least 3 worlds called Eden). The coordinates are long since lost - and Earth itself is, as Dumarest discovers, proscribed for some reason.

But he finds clues: a rhyme concerning the Zodiac, a painting depicting Earth's Moon as he remembers it, a strip of plastic bearing a spectroscopic record which he's sure is of Sol. He makes his way doing odd jobs and, when he has to, fighting with a knife in the arena. The series is often violent, but not for the sake of it. Often he comes so very close to finding Earth, but doesn't quite manage it.

One benevolent influence is the Church of the Universal Brotherhood. The monks, based on the planet Hope, travel far and wide, doing what they can for the sick and needy, yet they can also be found in the courts and palaces of the rich and powerful. For all their mild, unassuming demeanour, the monks are a product of high technology and the Church is a power not to be messed with.

Nor is the Cyclan.

This is an organisation equally widespread in the galaxy, comprised of Cybers - men who are trained in logic and respect nothing else (no women, they're considered too irrational - ladies, DON'T FLAME ME, I didn't write the damn thing!). When young they're trained and, at a certain point in their development, operated on in such a way that they no longer feel emotion and are not subject to its distractions. They utilise logic to predict future events, and so are very valuable to leaders and businessmen.

Except that they have a hidden agenda, of which few - including Dumarest - are aware. Their intent is to take over the entire Galaxy, remodelling it to conform to purely logical goals, doing away with all inefficiency and wasteful duplication. The poor and sick (from whom acolytes are sometimes plucked to be trained as Cybers) will be eliminated. Every piece of advice they give is aimed in the long term at subjugating and ultimately conquering whomever they're advising in accordance with their Master Plan. If you invite a Cyber to advise you, then you're effectively giving your world over to domination by the Cyclan. Yet if you don't, they'll advise your competitors instead, ruining you - and ultimately taking them over instead.

They employ Central Intelligence, an organic computer composed of millions of naked Cyber brains. Freed of all bodily distractions, the brains are even more logical and efficient. They pass orders and information to the Cybers by use of the Homochon elements, a graft of alien tissue which provides ultra-fast communication and the closest thing Cybers can experience to ecstasy when they're in communion with it. Every Cyber aspires to join Central Intelligence at the end of a useful and productive life (by their standards).

A Cyclan research lab creates the Affinity Twin - this is an artificial symbiote composed of 15 molecular units. The last is either dominant or submissive, depending on its orientation in the molecule. It can be used to completely control the host, submissive body, all sensation and knowledge being ported FTL to the dominant half. With the Twin, Cybers could control rulers and managers directly, and no-one would ever know - making the Master Plan achievable in a human lifetime.

But they don't know the correct sequence of units.

Brasque, the scientist who developed it in book #4, destroyed all records and fled to Solis, his home, to give his crippled wife a new life in the young, healthy body of her servant before dying of the wounds he sustained in his escape. She acquires precognition as a side-effect of the symbiote. She meets and falls in love with Dumarest, and he with her, and before her death at Cyber Mede's hands, she passes him the secret encoded via sonic trigger in the ring she bequeaths him (she, of course, knows she's going to die) - except that at first, Dumarest doesn't know that.

Now Tubb, rest his soul, made a mistake here: Brother Jerome, the High Monk of the Universal Brotherhood, tells a grieving Dumarest that even if the Cyclan could construct and test a chain every second it would take them four thousand years to check them all - and to construct and test a chain takes a minimum of 8 hours. This is in fact incorrect - it's nearer to forty thousand years:

15! = 1,307,674,368,000 seconds. That's 21,794,572,800 minutes. 363,242,880 hours. 15,135,120 days. So 41,737.7 and a bit years.

That's constructing and testing 1 chain every second. But it takes 8 hours - so that means 1,193,405,765.9 and a bit years!

Either way, it's an eternity in human or Cyber terms - time Dumarest could save them, if they capture him and, via torture (being logical, the Cyclan is no more above torture than the sea is above the sky - they're logical and therefore utterly amoral), determine the correct sequence.

But when he discovers he has it, in the sixth book of the series, he becomes grimly determined to keep the secret out of their hands - by this time he's lost three women he'd loved (Derai in #2, Kalin in #4, Lallia in #6) at their hands and thus he hates the Cyclan and everything it stands for in his very bones. Most of the rest of the series concerns their attempts to capture him, and the various, often ingenious ways in which he frustrates them, often costing Cybers' lives.

And all the while, he's getting closer to Earth, which apparently neither the Church nor the Cyclan wants him to find...

If only they could tell his backstory properly, or write a good origin story, it'd make a brilliant Netflix or Amazon series. Adults-only, though; there's too much blood and gore for kids. Tubb wrote 33 books in total, and had intended to combine them, eliminating all repetition, in volumes. Alas, he didn't live long enough; he was born in 1919.