Eminent physicist and science fiction master Gregory Benford has won numerous honors including two Nebula Awards and the United Nations Medal for Literature. Now continuing the transcendental adventure of his novella, Beyond the Fall of Night, Benford presents a visionary work of stunning imaginative power that spans dimensions and galactic space in the far future... Cley is an Original, a genetically pure member of the most ancient Ur-Human beings. Like others of her forest-dwelling tribe, she expects to spend her few centuries working in the great subterranean Library of Life. Then catastrophe strikes when strange, transdimensional life-forms obliterate the Library and kill all of Earth's Originals -- except Cley. These uncanny beings also attack the planet's most advanced human species, the highly evolved Supras, who cannot reconstruct the knowledge and DNA lost in the Library's ruins. Nor can they protect Cley... Forced to flee, Cley must begin a desperate quest for survival, answers, and hope. Joined by a raccoonlike companion called Seeker, she will journey across the myriad environments of her wildly transformed world...and then far, far beyond. For somewhere -- past planets that have been reengineered, past sentient ship-worlds evolving deep between stars, past creatures the size of solar systems -- waits the Malign. A being so powerful that it can escape a black hole, the Malign is destroying the galaxy as it hunts down the one thing it fears...