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Superluminary #1-3
Superluminary
Being assassinated once may be an accident. Being assassinated twice is enemy action.
Aeneas Tell of the House of Tell is one of the youngest Lords of Creation. His family rules the Nine Worlds through its control of the ultra-advanced technology that has permitted the colonization of the entire solar System. More gods than men, the Lords of Creation have cheated Death itself. But even a quasi-immortal god will take exception to being assassinated. Twice. Especially when the assassin turns out to be a someone he thought was a friend.
And when his assassinations turn out to be a prelude to interstellar war on the grandest possible scale with an evil so cosmic that its limits can scarcely be imagined, Aeneas has no choice but to declare himself the Emperor of Man.
SUPERLUMINARY is the latest and most brilliant creation of science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright, the Dragon-award winning author of THE UNWITHERING REALM, THE GOLDEN AGE, MOTH & COBWEB, and AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND.
Aeneas Tell of the House of Tell is one of the youngest Lords of Creation. His family rules the Nine Worlds through its control of the ultra-advanced technology that has permitted the colonization of the entire solar System. More gods than men, the Lords of Creation have cheated Death itself. But even a quasi-immortal god will take exception to being assassinated. Twice. Especially when the assassin turns out to be a someone he thought was a friend.
And when his assassinations turn out to be a prelude to interstellar war on the grandest possible scale with an evil so cosmic that its limits can scarcely be imagined, Aeneas has no choice but to declare himself the Emperor of Man.
SUPERLUMINARY is the latest and most brilliant creation of science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright, the Dragon-award winning author of THE UNWITHERING REALM, THE GOLDEN AGE, MOTH & COBWEB, and AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND.
482 pages, Paperback
First published July 5, 2018
5 people are currently reading
80 people want to read
About the author
John C. Wright
136 books449 followersJohn C. Wright (John Charles Justin Wright, born 1961) is an American author of science fiction and fantasy novels. A Nebula award finalist (for the fantasy novel Orphans of Chaos), he was called "this fledgling century's most important new SF talent" by Publishers Weekly (after publication of his debut novel, The Golden Age).
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
May 10, 2024
Absolutely Amazing!
A full review too come after a more recent reread. One my my best books from the esteemed John C. Wright and definitely part of my favorites of all time shelf.
Read II: 2021
A full review too come after a more recent reread. One my my best books from the esteemed John C. Wright and definitely part of my favorites of all time shelf.
Read II: 2021
August 10, 2018
I read these separately, but they felt more like a single work. It was a wild, technobabbly ride, like a pulpier version of the author's Count to Infinity series. I wouldn't say either series is my favorite; I feel like Wright's fantasy characters tend to feel more fleshed out than his post-human superdudes like Aeneas, the hero of the story and at first, just another grandchild of the late emperor of the human race.
Aeneas is a little more human than his feuding aunts and uncles; he believes in restoring democracy to the solar system, where the vast powers discovered by his imperial grandfather and distributed among his sons and daughters have hopelessly perverted the politics of Man. This seems but little grounds for the assassination attempt on Aeneas, and it turns out Bigger Matters are at stake. Outside the solar system, the galaxy is under the control of a sort of vampire Borg collective that Grandfather apparently knew about but kept a secret. It will take the latter two thirds of the story (and a whole lot of technobabble) to save mankind from this existential threat.
If you like your technobabble fast and furious with exploding stars and vast interstellar tragic histories, or even if you just want to see more Dyson spheres in one book than anywhere else in science fiction, this is the story for you.
Aeneas is a little more human than his feuding aunts and uncles; he believes in restoring democracy to the solar system, where the vast powers discovered by his imperial grandfather and distributed among his sons and daughters have hopelessly perverted the politics of Man. This seems but little grounds for the assassination attempt on Aeneas, and it turns out Bigger Matters are at stake. Outside the solar system, the galaxy is under the control of a sort of vampire Borg collective that Grandfather apparently knew about but kept a secret. It will take the latter two thirds of the story (and a whole lot of technobabble) to save mankind from this existential threat.
If you like your technobabble fast and furious with exploding stars and vast interstellar tragic histories, or even if you just want to see more Dyson spheres in one book than anywhere else in science fiction, this is the story for you.
March 11, 2022
-- Teleport the Andromeda Galaxy to defeat the Space Vampires
John C. Wright is a big ideas scifi author, but has a tendency to get silly. Superluminary has a bit of both. The discoverer of an alien artifact gets access to (technology that is indistinguishable from) magic, and sets himself up as emperor of the solar system, with his children ruling over the planets, moons, and asteroids. Then, space vampires. I was disappointed when we never dug into the democratization of magic, and while there was some interesting zero-sum game theory going on with the vampires, again it was under-developed. But the plot moved along and one episode hooked into the next. Unlike the unimaginably ancient and malevolent un-life infesting the galactic core, I was satisfied.
John C. Wright is a big ideas scifi author, but has a tendency to get silly. Superluminary has a bit of both. The discoverer of an alien artifact gets access to (technology that is indistinguishable from) magic, and sets himself up as emperor of the solar system, with his children ruling over the planets, moons, and asteroids. Then, space vampires. I was disappointed when we never dug into the democratization of magic, and while there was some interesting zero-sum game theory going on with the vampires, again it was under-developed. But the plot moved along and one episode hooked into the next. Unlike the unimaginably ancient and malevolent un-life infesting the galactic core, I was satisfied.
April 4, 2022
A great but flawed exploration of ideas
I found this to be a fascinating exploration of some weird ideas about power, the nature of the universe, anti-life, fucked up families, violence,...
To be clear, there is a painful heteronormativity in this author's works, as there exists no exploration or questioning of the stereotypical male/female rigid western images, but everything else is poked at, explored, played with. I also do not agree on a lot of aspects with the vision of humans that stems from this book, but I also highly enjoyed the tensions and ideas proposed.
I think this is the main strength of science-fiction: open up doors to explore ideas. We don't have to agree with all, but boy do I enjoy this author's wild, crazy thoughts.
A lot of fun, a lot of action. The further you go, the crazier it gets.
I found this to be a fascinating exploration of some weird ideas about power, the nature of the universe, anti-life, fucked up families, violence,...
To be clear, there is a painful heteronormativity in this author's works, as there exists no exploration or questioning of the stereotypical male/female rigid western images, but everything else is poked at, explored, played with. I also do not agree on a lot of aspects with the vision of humans that stems from this book, but I also highly enjoyed the tensions and ideas proposed.
I think this is the main strength of science-fiction: open up doors to explore ideas. We don't have to agree with all, but boy do I enjoy this author's wild, crazy thoughts.
A lot of fun, a lot of action. The further you go, the crazier it gets.
August 4, 2025
There are books you read. Then there are books you ride, barely holding on, white-knuckled, wind-scorched, as the story hurtles through dimensions you didn't know fiction could visit. John C. Wright’s Superluminary trilogy? That was one of those rides. Or maybe a detonation.
I came to the series at a strange point in my life—exhausted from chasing sense in too many things. In the classroom, I was teaching Orwell and Woolf, deconstructing syntax with surgical precision, while secretly longing for something reckless. Not reckless in style, but in scope. I wanted a narrative that didn’t just walk up to the edge of reality—it punched through the veil and rewired the stars.
Enter Superluminary.
The trilogy—The Lords of Creation, The Space Vampires, The World Armada—came to me as a recommendation wrapped in a warning: “This is batshit. But brilliant batshit.” I thought, “Perfect.” I cracked open the first book—and didn’t come back to Earth for three weeks.
Now let’s get this straight: if you’re looking for hard science fiction in the Greg Egan sense—ruthless, grounded, and rigorously extrapolated—this series is not that.
But if you’re open to science fiction in the style of myth—where neutron stars wear crowns and consciousness is software running on dyson-brain matrices—then you’re in for a cosmic treat laced with radioactive cinnamon.
Wright opens the series with Aeneas Tell, an exiled prince and supergenius from a solar civilization that long ago outgrew things like death, biology, or the speed of light. The first few chapters feel like Paradise Lost rewritten by a physicist on a Lovecraft bender. Within pages, we meet quantum necromancers, energy-based aristocrats, and dead gods being rebooted from star-cores. The prose? Rich, formal, archaic. The science? Plausible enough to pretend it’s holding up the opera set.
And it works—absurdly well. I still don’t know how.
I remember vividly one particular night while reading The Space Vampires—the second installment. It was 3 a.m. The power had gone out. I was sitting by candlelight, reading on my phone like a monk decoding forbidden scripture. Aeneas was in battle with a vampire consciousness that fed not on blood, but on entropy. The kind of enemy that cannot be killed by guns or grit, but by collapsing your own probability waveform to escape its hunger.
My cat blinked at me from across the room. The ceiling fan creaked in the dark.
And I thought: this is exactly what I needed.
Wright writes like a man possessed—not just by ideas, but by symbols. The trilogy fuses high-octane pulp with genuine metaphysics. These aren’t just space battles; they’re ontological arguments with antimatter missiles. There are entire star systems governed by Platonic forms. There are emperors who wield time dilation like political leverage. At one point, a war is fought between beings who live in alternate timelines, each trying to overwrite the other’s reality through narrative force.
It sounds insane. It is insane.
But it’s also dazzlingly smart.
When I tried explaining the plot to a friend—“So the protagonist becomes a Living Star and has to fight his undead siblings who are draining entropy from the universe to maintain immortality…”—she asked me if I was feeling okay. I wasn’t. I was glowing. Something in this trilogy tapped into the part of my imagination I hadn’t used since childhood—the one that believed anything was possible if you said it with enough conviction and pseudoscience.
And that’s where Superluminary really shines.
This isn’t a world constrained by probability. It’s a mythology made from math. Like Olaf Stapledon on caffeine and Jack Vance with a PhD in astrophysics. You don’t read Wright to believe in his science—you read him to believe in meaning through science. His characters talk about cosmic scale with Shakespearean gravity. When Aeneas stares into the void, it’s not with nihilism—it’s with godlike responsibility. What if you could control the singularity? Would you rewrite physics? Would you resurrect the dead? Would you create a better universe—or just burn this one brighter?
Heavy questions. Delivered with rocket boots and gothic tiaras.
Now, I know there are readers who find Wright too florid. Too old-fashioned. Too big. But that’s like walking into a cathedral and complaining about the stained glass. The trilogy knows it’s grandiose. That’s the point. The language is ornate because the ideas are mythic. Aeneas isn’t just a hero—he’s a Promethean rebel, a post-human Odysseus who’s rewriting the fate of galaxies. He speaks like he’s aware history is recording his every syllable.
And yes, the trilogy dips gleefully into space-fantasy. There are vampires. There are god-kings. There are souls uploaded into lightwaves and resurrected via quantum computing. But none of it feels shallow. Wright takes his absurdities seriously. And in doing so, he makes you believe, if only for a moment, that a star could speak.
In my classroom, I often wrestle with the idea of plausibility. Students want “relatable” fiction, stories they can see themselves in. That’s fine. But fiction should also be about transcendence. About touching the strange. Superluminary did that for me. It reminded me that speculative fiction doesn’t have to shrink itself to stay relevant. Sometimes, it needs to explode to remain honest.
The world today is weird, terrifying, and fast. Reading about dyson-sphere dynasties and star-blooded kings felt weirdly soothing. Because it reframes the chaos—not as threat, but as potential. The series doesn’t ignore entropy or death. It hacks them. Wright’s universe doesn’t stop at human limitation; it absorbs it and evolves. At its heart, Superluminary is about vision—seeing beyond flesh, beyond time, into something larger and stranger. And then asking: Now what do you do with that vision?
By the time I reached The World Armada, the third and final book, I knew I wasn’t reading for resolution. I was reading for transformation.
Aeneas was no longer just a man. He had become a moral force. His struggle wasn’t about survival—it was about stewardship. Could he build a better cosmos? Could he forgive the horrors of his undead siblings? Could he redeem them through light?
Big questions. Bigger answers. And somehow, Wright makes it all pulse with tension and beauty.
I closed the trilogy with tears in my eyes and plasma in my brain.
So here’s my verdict: Superluminary isn’t hard science fiction in the Greg Egan or Kim Stanley Robinson sense. It doesn’t care for plausibility the way a textbook does. But it is intellectually serious. It just operates in a register closer to metaphysical opera than speculative journalism. Wright is less interested in how wormholes might really work, and more in what kind of kingdom you could build from one. It’s cosmic fiction. Baroque, bold, bizarre.
If I had to triangulate its influences, I’d say Olaf Stapledon meets Jack Vance meets Michio Kaku on a bender. Or maybe Borges trapped inside an Asimov databank. Either way, it’s glorious.
And personal. Because reading this trilogy reminded me why I fell in love with science fiction in the first place—not because it made me understand the world, but because it dared to remake it.
Some books change how you think.
Superluminary changed how I dream.
I came to the series at a strange point in my life—exhausted from chasing sense in too many things. In the classroom, I was teaching Orwell and Woolf, deconstructing syntax with surgical precision, while secretly longing for something reckless. Not reckless in style, but in scope. I wanted a narrative that didn’t just walk up to the edge of reality—it punched through the veil and rewired the stars.
Enter Superluminary.
The trilogy—The Lords of Creation, The Space Vampires, The World Armada—came to me as a recommendation wrapped in a warning: “This is batshit. But brilliant batshit.” I thought, “Perfect.” I cracked open the first book—and didn’t come back to Earth for three weeks.
Now let’s get this straight: if you’re looking for hard science fiction in the Greg Egan sense—ruthless, grounded, and rigorously extrapolated—this series is not that.
But if you’re open to science fiction in the style of myth—where neutron stars wear crowns and consciousness is software running on dyson-brain matrices—then you’re in for a cosmic treat laced with radioactive cinnamon.
Wright opens the series with Aeneas Tell, an exiled prince and supergenius from a solar civilization that long ago outgrew things like death, biology, or the speed of light. The first few chapters feel like Paradise Lost rewritten by a physicist on a Lovecraft bender. Within pages, we meet quantum necromancers, energy-based aristocrats, and dead gods being rebooted from star-cores. The prose? Rich, formal, archaic. The science? Plausible enough to pretend it’s holding up the opera set.
And it works—absurdly well. I still don’t know how.
I remember vividly one particular night while reading The Space Vampires—the second installment. It was 3 a.m. The power had gone out. I was sitting by candlelight, reading on my phone like a monk decoding forbidden scripture. Aeneas was in battle with a vampire consciousness that fed not on blood, but on entropy. The kind of enemy that cannot be killed by guns or grit, but by collapsing your own probability waveform to escape its hunger.
My cat blinked at me from across the room. The ceiling fan creaked in the dark.
And I thought: this is exactly what I needed.
Wright writes like a man possessed—not just by ideas, but by symbols. The trilogy fuses high-octane pulp with genuine metaphysics. These aren’t just space battles; they’re ontological arguments with antimatter missiles. There are entire star systems governed by Platonic forms. There are emperors who wield time dilation like political leverage. At one point, a war is fought between beings who live in alternate timelines, each trying to overwrite the other’s reality through narrative force.
It sounds insane. It is insane.
But it’s also dazzlingly smart.
When I tried explaining the plot to a friend—“So the protagonist becomes a Living Star and has to fight his undead siblings who are draining entropy from the universe to maintain immortality…”—she asked me if I was feeling okay. I wasn’t. I was glowing. Something in this trilogy tapped into the part of my imagination I hadn’t used since childhood—the one that believed anything was possible if you said it with enough conviction and pseudoscience.
And that’s where Superluminary really shines.
This isn’t a world constrained by probability. It’s a mythology made from math. Like Olaf Stapledon on caffeine and Jack Vance with a PhD in astrophysics. You don’t read Wright to believe in his science—you read him to believe in meaning through science. His characters talk about cosmic scale with Shakespearean gravity. When Aeneas stares into the void, it’s not with nihilism—it’s with godlike responsibility. What if you could control the singularity? Would you rewrite physics? Would you resurrect the dead? Would you create a better universe—or just burn this one brighter?
Heavy questions. Delivered with rocket boots and gothic tiaras.
Now, I know there are readers who find Wright too florid. Too old-fashioned. Too big. But that’s like walking into a cathedral and complaining about the stained glass. The trilogy knows it’s grandiose. That’s the point. The language is ornate because the ideas are mythic. Aeneas isn’t just a hero—he’s a Promethean rebel, a post-human Odysseus who’s rewriting the fate of galaxies. He speaks like he’s aware history is recording his every syllable.
And yes, the trilogy dips gleefully into space-fantasy. There are vampires. There are god-kings. There are souls uploaded into lightwaves and resurrected via quantum computing. But none of it feels shallow. Wright takes his absurdities seriously. And in doing so, he makes you believe, if only for a moment, that a star could speak.
In my classroom, I often wrestle with the idea of plausibility. Students want “relatable” fiction, stories they can see themselves in. That’s fine. But fiction should also be about transcendence. About touching the strange. Superluminary did that for me. It reminded me that speculative fiction doesn’t have to shrink itself to stay relevant. Sometimes, it needs to explode to remain honest.
The world today is weird, terrifying, and fast. Reading about dyson-sphere dynasties and star-blooded kings felt weirdly soothing. Because it reframes the chaos—not as threat, but as potential. The series doesn’t ignore entropy or death. It hacks them. Wright’s universe doesn’t stop at human limitation; it absorbs it and evolves. At its heart, Superluminary is about vision—seeing beyond flesh, beyond time, into something larger and stranger. And then asking: Now what do you do with that vision?
By the time I reached The World Armada, the third and final book, I knew I wasn’t reading for resolution. I was reading for transformation.
Aeneas was no longer just a man. He had become a moral force. His struggle wasn’t about survival—it was about stewardship. Could he build a better cosmos? Could he forgive the horrors of his undead siblings? Could he redeem them through light?
Big questions. Bigger answers. And somehow, Wright makes it all pulse with tension and beauty.
I closed the trilogy with tears in my eyes and plasma in my brain.
So here’s my verdict: Superluminary isn’t hard science fiction in the Greg Egan or Kim Stanley Robinson sense. It doesn’t care for plausibility the way a textbook does. But it is intellectually serious. It just operates in a register closer to metaphysical opera than speculative journalism. Wright is less interested in how wormholes might really work, and more in what kind of kingdom you could build from one. It’s cosmic fiction. Baroque, bold, bizarre.
If I had to triangulate its influences, I’d say Olaf Stapledon meets Jack Vance meets Michio Kaku on a bender. Or maybe Borges trapped inside an Asimov databank. Either way, it’s glorious.
And personal. Because reading this trilogy reminded me why I fell in love with science fiction in the first place—not because it made me understand the world, but because it dared to remake it.
Some books change how you think.
Superluminary changed how I dream.
November 1, 2023
I have never got into anything Wright has written except for Golden Age and this follows that trend. It is a 90% fantasy book in the guise of SF, but blurting out some pulpy pseudo science every time to justify some new magical ability with no foreshadowing that magically saves the day, does not a good book make.
Some good foundational ideas like, a family becoming Gods to due to access to advanced technology, recreating humanity in each of the families individual visions. The conflict with Aliens. But the execution is just dreadful. Yes I can understand advanced science can come off as magic but then he proceed to explain it in insanely silly sort of makes sense way so it can fit into a SF category.
Golden age was amazing. I dont know what happened but I don't think the author has the ability to craft a decent SF that can deliver his ambitions for the plot.
Some good foundational ideas like, a family becoming Gods to due to access to advanced technology, recreating humanity in each of the families individual visions. The conflict with Aliens. But the execution is just dreadful. Yes I can understand advanced science can come off as magic but then he proceed to explain it in insanely silly sort of makes sense way so it can fit into a SF category.
Golden age was amazing. I dont know what happened but I don't think the author has the ability to craft a decent SF that can deliver his ambitions for the plot.
November 19, 2023
Potential, but wasted. He needed to spend more time on the intrigue and politics of the admittedly interesting characters and scenario he set up. Rather it just seemed like page after page of repetitive Star Trek technobabble. The author is clearly capable of much more, not giving up on him after this first read.
July 18, 2020
This series was great. Sometimes a little on the nose but it flowed quicker than count to infinity. I loved the implications regarding dangerous knowledge, militias, freedom of information, and entrusting free people with dangerous weapons for the greater good.
August 21, 2025
Very interesting science fiction. Fast paced, a lot of deus ex machina in it. It starts out with the human race ruled by a family of basically demi-gods. Powers beyond comprehension which come from technology their father found from an alien civilization. He gave them each a part of it and the claimed and terraformed the worlds and moons of the solar system. Some nods to mythology here. Lord Jupiter has powers of electromagnetism and throws lightning as a weapon. Lord Mercury is super fast. Lady Venus is lovely and had mind controlling technology everyone fears.
Like any good myth - they rebelled against their overlord father and threw him down so they could rule. But they all know he had more knowledge and power he never shared. Power that would let them travel faster than light and leave the solar system.
That power gets found - and they discover the reason no alien signals have ever reached them from outside the solar system...
In a lot of ways this reminded me of Simon Green's Nightside books. That type of fiction of people, creatures and powers but instead of a fantasy / religious setting it's a science fiction / galaxy setting.
Like any good myth - they rebelled against their overlord father and threw him down so they could rule. But they all know he had more knowledge and power he never shared. Power that would let them travel faster than light and leave the solar system.
That power gets found - and they discover the reason no alien signals have ever reached them from outside the solar system...
In a lot of ways this reminded me of Simon Green's Nightside books. That type of fiction of people, creatures and powers but instead of a fantasy / religious setting it's a science fiction / galaxy setting.
December 19, 2023
Large and expressive ideas, but felt like weak execution. At this scale, it was hard for me to really understand what was being described a lot of the time, and I just have to take his word for it that macroscale engineering on a galactic scale and far-future manipulation of the fundamental laws of physics really can work like this. I am okay with this, generally speaking, but it did make it all seem a lot more remote and hard to comprehend compared to others of his writings that were more down-to-earth. The characters in his stories also felt a lot less real and more like caricatures: I didn't feel like any of them were as real or as memorable as Phaethon or Atkins from "the Golden Age" trilogy, or as Meneleus Montrose or Ximen del Azarchel from the "Count to Infinity" sequence. The ending was cool, but overall I found this book only okay, not fascinating like John C. Wright's other series' that I've loved so much.
May 7, 2022
I managed to "read" 40 something % of this before I put it down. Repetitious and boring.
Its just a lot of damage, then magic, then repeating it again.
I can see others liking it .. but not me.
Its just a lot of damage, then magic, then repeating it again.
I can see others liking it .. but not me.
October 11, 2019
Outstanding mind blowing epic and more could not put it down
September 7, 2024
pretty fun. engaging story that doesn't take itself too seriously, cool scifi concepts. not deep or memorable, but solid book throughout
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews