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Ok, so the subject line is probably not super helpful. The premise of the book is the discovery of a separate dimension of pure energy. Reactors are created that can punch a hole between dimensions and tap the energy. Space travel through the alternate dimension is developed. You can punch a hole, step into the other dimension and travel, then come back though at a distant point in our dimension, effectively allowing FTL travel. Folks go out and colonize a planet with this tech. They lay down a power grid on the planet field by the dimension-hole reactors, and managed by helpful AI. The power grid allows all sorts of almost magical things.

Something goes wrong and the colony is cut off from home. The colonists realize that they're going to collapse into a dark age. The AI decides it's smarter than the humans anyway, and chooses to adopt the role of neutral observer, to study them.

I didn't read any of the other books, but my impression was that this was the prologue sci-fi book that led into a psuedo-fantasy series of books generations after the fall of the original colonists when their descendants had forgotten their origins. Any help is greatly appreciated. Not being able to pin down author or title of this book is driving me nuts.

3
  • How old is this book?
    – user14111
    Mar 1, 2017 at 9:27
  • 1
    The Council War series by John Ringo doesn't really fit the information but if you were reading something else at the same time you could be combining elements, it sounds very interesting though so I hope it gets an actual answer.
    – revenant
    Mar 1, 2017 at 9:52
  • probable duplicate of scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/63550/…
    – Otis
    Aug 24, 2018 at 23:06

1 Answer 1

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Sounds like this may be the Soul Rider Series by Jack L. Chalker

  • Spirits of Flux and Anchor, Tor Books, 1984 (ISBN 0-8125-3320-8)
  • Empires of Flux and Anchor, Tor Books, 1984 (ISBN 0-8125-3329-1)
  • Masters of Flux and Anchor, Tor Books, January, 1985 (ISBN 0-8125-3281-3)
  • The Birth of Flux and Anchor, Tor Books, 1985 (ISBN 0-8125-2292-3)
  • Children of Flux and Anchor, Tor Books, September, 1986 (ISBN 0-8125-2340-7)

    enter image description here

It's not revealed until one of the later books that the 'anchors' were the endpoints of a travel network that had been closed off thousands of years previously in order to prevent an alien threat from coming thru. Flux was the mathematical ether that was the basis of reality and could be molded "magically" into anything.

2
  • As soon as I saw the subject line my mind immediately went to this series just from that one sentence.
    – Forral
    Mar 1, 2017 at 21:22
  • Oh, and @Tstonum, from your description the specific one you read would have been Book 4 - The Birth of Flux and Anchor. The others deal with a time period after the discovery of the alternate universe and founding of the colony.
    – Forral
    Mar 1, 2017 at 21:44

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