The novel “Transcendence” by Charles Sheffield was published for the first time in 1992. It’s the third book of the Heritage universe and is the sequel to “Divengence” It’s also part of the omnibus titled “Transvergence”.

The fierce Zardalu are back but no one believes it. Not even the testimony of a respected scientist such as Darya Lang, that of a Councilor and that of an android who can’t lie, are not considered. They need to find hard evidence so the heterogeneous group who stumbled into a group of Zardalu in stasis intends to find out where they ended up.

Nobody ever knew the location of Genizee, the Zardalu homeworld, and over the millennia passed since they were considered extinct no one found it. But no one had as much information as the group that met them and thanks to the new data they locate the area of space where to find the planet. The problem is that it’s a large space-time anomaly.

“Divergence” ended with the discovery by the protagonists that the terrible Zardalu were not extinct. Even worse, some of them were free again with who knows what consequences. Several millennia have passed since various species of Zardalu slaves had rebelled and thought they exterminated them.

In “Transcendence”, the unlikely group of humans and aliens together with the android E.C. Tally tries to locate the Zardalu home planet to find evidence that they are back. Charles Sheffield doesn’t tell the attempt of the protagonists to warn of the impending danger but skips ahead to the time when they decide to act on their own after their claims have been considered preposterous.

Another event only hinted afterwards is the change that occurred in one of the protagonists, Julius Graves. To have additional memories, he was implanted two more cerebral hemispheres but they had developed their own independent personality, so much that it called himself Steven. Julius and Steven integrated into a single personality, who calls himself Julian.

At the beginning of “Transcendence” Charles Sheffield gives us an update on these developments via the novel’s protagonists but soon the action ended in “Divengence” resumes. Putting together the information gathered in their previous adventure, they manage to find the area of space where to find Genizee, the Zardalu home planet.

The new adventure of the protagonists is dangerous not only because they’ll have to deal with an absolutely ruthless species but also because they’ll have to travel in the region of space known as the Torvil Anfract. That’s a huge space anomaly where the laws of physics can suddenly change.

After these premises, “Transcendence” ends up being mostly the story of how the protagonists must face the Zardalu once again. There’s more action than in the previous novel because creatures who want to kill and / or eat them are a more immediate threat than a space anomaly.

The protagonists are forced to split and especially in the second part of “Transcendence” the action is sometimes a little chaotic. That’s inevitable because this is still a novel set in the Heritage universe and on Genizee the protagonists find more than they expected.

In the Torvil Anfract there are several forces at work and this has consequences. There’s bound to be a bit of fragmentation in the narrative of the events but if the reader pays some attention it’s not difficult to understand what’s happening. In the end, the protagonists get new answers but also some new questions.

For these reasons, in “Transcendence” the pace is generally quite high, faster than in “Divengence”. In this novel the development of the characters continues so for example Darya Lang is no longer the professor who can handle only a research through examining documents. Personally, however, I got soon bored by the constant Louis Nenda’s attempts to deny his interest in Darya but it’s a matter of taste.

Like the previous books of the Heritage series, “Transcendence” ends leaving various narrative threads open. If you liked the first two novels, I think you should really go on because this is their worthy sequel.