Trying to find a story were there are two humans on an alien world of many species but one ruling species

Question

Now my memory of the book is from a while ago and I don't know if everything is accurate, but here's a brain dump of all that I've got.

I read it 6-ish years ago, it wasn't very old though I can't remember the computer technology referenced in the book that would give its age away.

Main character is male. There is a female character who may be his daughter. The main character is human on an alien world with a variety of species. He may have been a representative of humanity to this other world. He stayed on this world for a time, came back for a couple years, then returned because he couldn't stay away.

There is a kingdom style leadership on this world. The overseers are intelligent and vastly technologically superior. The "crazy" overseers are actually children of that species. There is something in the sky (an aether?) that destroys most things but the overseers have ships that can travel through them. The ships work by you thinking where you want to go.

The female main character is made blind and sent to live with psychic animals. The psychic animals group together to enhance their psychic power and rebel against the overseers. she records her experiences in a book by pin pricking it. She has the option to get her sight back with overseer technology, but she provides them with the ability to see everything that she is doing then.

The male character is about to blow-up the overseers main fortress when something happens, he was going to use an antimatter bomb. He ends up getting his memory wiped by the overseers, I think a female one.

I've scoured NPR's Top 100 Sci-Fi books list and it's isn't on there. Neither is it on http://bestsciencefictionbooks.com/top-25-best-science-fiction-books.php.

Thank you for any help you can provide!

Answer 1

Years of searching and reading hundreds of booklists and synopsis and reviews have finally come to an end this glorious night when I conducted my quarterly Google-ing for this book based off of what memory fragments still remained with me. Through completely indirect means (Google-ing what I'm now aware are utterly wrong plot points and character/location names) I came across a http://best-sci-fi-books.com/reddits-favorite-stand-alone-sf-novels/ where I saw a booked called "The Scar" by China Mieville. Something about "scar" seemed to ring a bell, so I Google-ed "book sci-fi the scar river sun", an amalgamation of my normal search prefix—"book sci-fi"—with my standard search terms—"river" and "sun" which my gut told me were important to the plot—with this new term—"the scar". With a huge amount of luck, Google surfaced https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_of_the_New_Sun, a Wikipedia article for "The Book of the New Sun". The initial synopsis sounded completely wrong; something medieval like and with a torturer? But further reading started to pique dormant neurons which stored ephemeral memories of this great novel. Names like "Thecla" and "Thrax" started to set internal alarms off, and final confirmation was finally within reach when a wiki page (http://www.wolfewiki.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=WolfeWiki.Metaphysics) about the universe's metaphysics mentioned Yesod, a hyperspace plane that the "angels" could traverse.

With joy and relief, I am happy to say that this is the book I've been searching for over the past half decade. I've ordered a nice used copy from Amazon and am looking forward to rereading it to see how wildly off base my muddled memory of it is 😄.

Answer 2

Your narration closely resembles Dragon Ball GT. Just thought I might post this in case it might become helpful in your search.